ABSTRACT
Many studies have implicated frontal lobe damage, and especially damage to the prefrontal areas, which are held to subserve control processes, as the main etiological factor in cognitive deficits after closed head injury. Resource allocation, sequencing of tasks, and task-shifting are among the best known circumstances in which control processes are involved. To study control functions in closed head injury (CHI) patients, two approaches are available. One utilizes those tests that were developed to analyze frontal lobe functions. The other approach is based on the use of the reaction time (RT) procedure with experimental tasks that were devised to probe specific cognitive capabilities. Distracter inhibition is often studied by the use of the negative priming paradigm. This paradigm is based on the finding that, when a person is required to selectively respond to one of two simultaneously presented stimuli, then any inhibitory process acting on the ignored distracter becomes manifest if that distracter is subsequently re-presented as the target.
