Eskes Gail A, Klein Raymond M, Dove Mary Beth, Coolican Jamesie, Shore David I
Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, 5909 Veterans Memorial Lane, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 2E2, Canada.
J Neurosci Methods. 2007 Nov 30;166(2):259-65. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2007.07.006. Epub 2007 Aug 8.
Attentional disorders are common in individuals with neurological or psychiatric conditions and impact on recovery and outcome. Thus, it is critical to develop theory-based measures of attentional function to understand potential mechanisms underlying the disorder and to evaluate the effect of intervention. The present study compared two alternative methods to measure the effects of attentional cuing that could be used in populations of individuals who may not be able to make manual responses normally or may show overall slowing in responses. Spatial attention was measured with speeded and unspeeded methods using either manual or voice responses in two standard attention paradigms: the cued target discrimination reaction time (RT) paradigm and the unspeeded temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. The comparison of speeded and unspeeded tasks specifically addresses the concern about interpreting RT differences between cued and uncued trials (taken as a proxy for attention) in the context of drastically different baseline RTs. We found significant cuing effects for both tasks (speeded RT and untimed TOJ) and both response types (vocal and manual) giving clinicians and researchers alternative methods with which to measure the effects of attention in different populations who may not be able to perform the standard speeded RT task.
注意力障碍在患有神经或精神疾病的个体中很常见，并且会影响康复和预后。因此，开发基于理论的注意力功能测量方法对于理解该障碍潜在的机制以及评估干预效果至关重要。本研究比较了两种测量注意力提示效果的替代方法，这些方法可用于那些可能无法正常做出手动反应或可能表现出整体反应迟缓的个体群体。在两种标准注意力范式中，使用手动或语音反应，通过加速和非加速方法测量空间注意力：提示目标辨别反应时间（RT）范式和非加速时间顺序判断（TOJ）任务。加速和非加速任务的比较特别解决了在基线反应时间截然不同的情况下，解释提示和未提示试验之间的反应时间差异（作为注意力的代理指标）时所面临的问题。我们发现，对于这两项任务（加速反应时间和非定时时间顺序判断）以及两种反应类型（语音和手动）都有显著的提示效果，这为临床医生和研究人员提供了替代方法，以便在不同群体中测量注意力的效果，这些群体可能无法完成标准的加速反应时间任务。
