Divided attention impairments after traumatic brain injury

This research investigated whether people with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) are impaired on divided attention tasks requiring working memory. In experiment 1, a severe TBI and control group performed two tasks requiring working memory separately and concurrently. Results showed that the TBI group had impaired divided attention when performing the two tasks concurrently, although the two groups did not differ in performance when these tasks were performed separately. Experiment 2 showed that performance on the paced auditory serial addition task improved with increases in the intertrial interval for both TBI and control groups. A meta-analysis showed that TBIs are impaired on divided attention when the tasks require controlled processing, but not when the tasks can be carried out relatively automatically. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.