Online Awareness among Adolescents with Acquired Brain Injury: Preliminary Findings following Performance of Motor, Cognitive and Functional Tasks.

Online awareness is an ongoing ability to monitor performance within the stream of action. It involves the ability to detect errors during actual performance, as well as to potential problems. This preliminary within-subject study aimed to evaluate emergent and anticipatory online awareness among adolescents with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) during performance of motor, cognitive and functional tasks. 14 adolescents (11-18 years) following ABI were recruited. Before and after completion of the tasks, participants fulfilled task-related awareness questionnaires. In the motor task, no significant correlations were found between heart rate and the subjective perceived exertion scale (emergent awareness). In the cognitive task, no significant correlations were found between the estimated difficulty before the task (anticipatory awareness) and actual performance, however a significant correlation was found between performance and the self-evaluation of performance (emergent awareness), in the easiest item of the task. In the functional task, two main patterns of online awareness were recognized: accurate and overestimation of performance. Online awareness deficits in adolescents after ABI, vary as a function of task characteristics. Clinicians who aim to improve online awareness should direct interventions to mainly include functional tasks, as compared to cognitive and motor tasks.