Abstract
Mild closed head injuries (mCHI) are commonly associated with reports of persistent attention and memory impairment yet standardized neuropsychological tests often prove unable to detect these complaints. The purpose of this study was to determine if a more sensitive measure of attention impairment would better dissociate mCHI participants from controls. The Slip Induction Task was administered to 43 undergraduate students (21 mCHI). This task involves participants learning a sequence of hand movements to targets and after the sequence is well learned, occasionally requiring unexpected movements. These changes to the routine often induced action slips, where the participant incorrectly moved to the expected target. Surprisingly, we found that mCHI participants made fewer action slips than controls. However, when the unexpected movement was completed correctly, the mCHI participants took significantly longer to make this change than controls. Furthermore, only mCHI participants' speed on altered sequences predicted their likelihood of making errors. These results suggest that while the mCHI participants were more accurate, this came at a cost with respect to the amount of time required to correctly complete an unexpected movement. This implies that changes to the routine placed greater demands on the mCHI participants as reflected in a reduction in speed to compensate for their comparable accuracy.
