The Relation of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury to Chronic Lapses of Attention

Abstract

We assessed the extent to which failures in sustained attention were associated with chronic mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) deficits in cognitive control among college-age young adults with and without a history of sport-related concussion. Participants completed the ImPACT computer-based assessment and a modified flanker task. Results indicated that a history of mTBI, relative to healthy controls, was associated with inferior overall flanker task performance with a greater number of omission errors and more frequent sequentially occurring omission errors. Accordingly, these findings suggest that failures in the ability to maintain attentional vigilance may, in part, underlie mTBI-related cognition deficits.

Key words:

• cognitive control
• concussion
• sustained attention
• vigilance