ABSTRACT
Attentional difficulties are present in many forms of brain disease. Unilateral visual neglect is a common result of cerebrovascular accident or other brain damage of acute onset. Patients with brain injury or disease may appear vague and unable to maintain focus on a particular object or problem, or they may be distractable, unable to resist the pull of irrelevant environmental stimuli. Most attention retraining packages have relied initially on reaction-time (RT) training with progress from simple to discrimination and choice RT paradigms and increasing stimulus-response incompatibility. Attentional difficulties after closed-head injury may be particularly evident in mental-control tasks, such as serial sevens and backward digit span. Simple and discrimination reaction-time tasks are intended to provide training in self-modulation of arousal. An attempt was made over about two months to retrain his attention/concentration using two computerized tasks, Rapid Number Comparison and Digit Symbol Transfer.
