Studies of sustained-attention retraining following brain injury are reviewed, and found to have produced inconclusive results. The reason for this, it is suggested, is that a standard operational analysis of attention has not been applied, as evidenced by considerable inconsistency in the dependent measures and treatment methods used from study to study. The present study addresses this concern by applying well established principles of operant conditioning to the analysis and remediation of attention deficits. After briefly reviewing the variety of task parameters in the attention literature, noting ambiguities inherent in the various conceptualizations of attention, it is decided to train vigilance task performance, a relatively unambiguous and uncontroversial operational definition of sustained attention. Both the principle of immediacy, of reinforcement (feedback of correct and incorrect on each trial) and shaping (gradual increase of speed demands contingent on increased performance accuracy) are employed. The issue of generalization is deemed central to concerns of treatment efficacy, and is explored by administration of alternate versions of the same basic vigilance task. Results show that training with immediate reinforcement and speed-shaping produced better acquisition of the trained task than delayed feedback and invariant speed of stimulus presentation. Furthermore, gains resulting from training were essentially limited to the task on which training was conducted, with little evidence for generalization to like tasks employing different stimuli. These results are discussed in terms of the applicability of the construct of sustained attention to head injury rehabilitation. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/9567 |
| Date | 03 July 2018 |
| Creators | Van Doren, Jon Jay |
| Contributors | Goldwater, Bram |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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