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The Effects of Traumatic Brain Injury Essay

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I. Introduction The focus of this study was to examine the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in children and adolescents on prospective memory. The purpose of the study was to add to the scant research on the effects of TBI on prospective memory in children and adolescents. The authors were also interested in adding support to the existing theory that the prefrontal areas of the brain meditate prospective memory. (Ward et al., 2005) The authors were, for the purposes of this study, assuming that the brain’s prefrontal regions are involved in prospective memory. The authors theorized that younger children, with or without TBI, whose prefrontal regions are not fully developed, should perform poorly on prospective tasks. It was also …show more content…

The participants responded by pressing a green key for a response to a word, or a red key for a nonword. The lower level demand version of the task used longer words, and the higher level version used shorter words. The participants were also shown italic letters, 12 total, within some of the words and non-words presented to them, which are the prospective memory cues. Participants were told to press the 6th key, in a row of grey keys, when they saw an italic letter appear. The participants were also tested with the following tasks to observe executive functioning capabilities: Self Ordered Pointing Task (SOPT), Stroop Color Word Inference Task, and Tower of London (TOL). Responses were collected and data was created on each of the four groups (children and adolescents with and without TBI), showing correct responses for both the high and low cognitive demand levels of the task. The results of the study showed several outcomes. First, that in both groups lexical-decision accuracies were higher in low demand cognitive conditions than in the high conditions. Overall, those with TBI had lower overall prospective memory scores than the participants in the control groups. In addition to this, adolescents performed better than the children. However, as the cognitive demand of the tasks increased, there was a larger gap in performance between

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