Learning and Attentional Deficits After Diffuse Brain Injury: a Quantitative Study.

Following a closed head injury patients undergo extensive programs in rehabilitation or relearning. Many ordinary day to day activities, require the division of attention or the simultaneous processing of information. There is little research investigating either learning characteristics or performance under conditions requiring the simultaneous processing of information in the head injured population. The purpose of this study was to compare the learning characteristics of a group of severely brain injured subjects and normal subjects on a psychomotor task under conditions requiring the subject to divide his or her attention between tasks. The study population consisted of 13 individuals with severe diffuse head injury (at least six months post injury with reported coma greater than 24 hours) and 11 normal high school students. All participants were trained to perform a complex psychomotor task which involved driving a small motorized vehicle along a specific course. This formed the basis for the divided attention activities. The divided attention tasks were composed of three exercises: (1) the psychomotor task plus an auditory monitoring task, (2) the psychomotor task plus a visual identification task, and (3) the psychomotor task plus both the auditory and visual tasks together. Data analysis showed that the brain injured group demonstrated significant learning of the task, but (1) their performance at no time matched the normal group's in terms of time to complete the task; (2) their learning was more variable over trials than the normals; and (3) their performance was significantly worse on the three divided attention tasks compared to the normals. It was concluded that since the brain injured showed significantly different learning characteristics than the normals, professionals working with them must take these differences into account when planning and evaluating rehabilitation programs. Due to the divided attention deficit that the brain injured individuals exhibit they encounter difficulty in successfully executing many routine activities such as driving in traffic and being involved in multiple conversations. Rehabilitation specialists need to develop procedures to ameliorate the deficit or, to develop effective compensatory strategies if deficits cannot be eliminated.Ph.D.Experimental psychologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159643/1/8324281.pd