Visual selective attention after severe closed head injury

Abstract

This study investigated the nature of selective attention deficits after severe closed head injury (CHI). Twenty participants with severe CHI (greater than 1 year postinjury) and 20 matched controls completed search and nonsearch visual selective attention tasks under conditions of low (Experiment 1) and high (Experiment 2) target–distractor similarity. In the search situations, participants searched visual displays that contained 1, 4, or 8 items for the targets. In the nonsearch situations, the location of the targets was visually cued with a peripheral arrow. The results revealed that in both the low and high target–distractor similarity search conditions, CHI participants required a longer time than controls to locate and identify the target. In contrast, in the nonsearch condition, CHI participants were able to successfully ignore irrelevant task information when target–distractor similarity was low. However, when target–distractor similarity was high, CHI participants had more difficulty than controls ignoring the irrelevant information. These results suggest that, in comparison to controls, CHI participants may be at a disadvantage in selective attention situations when visual search is required and when the discriminability between targets and distractors is difficult. (JINS, 1998, 4, 144–159.)