Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: mild traumatic brain injury
- Creators: Azuma, Tamiko
Description
Military veterans have a significantly higher incidence of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), depression, and Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) compared to civilians. Military veterans also represent a rapidly growing subgroup of college students, due in part to the robust and financially incentivizing educational benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The overlapping cognitively impacting symptoms of service-related conditions combined with the underreporting of mTBI and psychiatric-related conditions, make accurate assessment of cognitive performance in military veterans challenging. Recent research findings provide conflicting information on cognitive performance patterns in military veterans. The purpose of this study was to determine whether service-related conditions and self-assessments predict performance on complex working memory and executive function tasks for military veteran college students. Sixty-one military veteran college students attending classes at Arizona State University campuses completed clinical neuropsychological tasks and experimental working memory and executive function tasks. The results revealed that a history of mTBI significantly predicted poorer performance in the areas of verbal working memory and decision-making. Depression significantly predicted poorer performance in executive function related to serial updating. In contrast, the commonly used clinical neuropsychological tasks were not sensitive service-related conditions including mTBI, PTSD, and depression. The differing performance patterns observed between the clinical tasks and the more complex experimental tasks support that researchers and clinicians should use tests that sufficiently tax verbal working memory and executive function when evaluating the subtle, higher-order cognitive deficits associated with mTBI and depression.
ContributorsGallagher, Karen Louise (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis advisor) / Liss, Julie (Committee member) / Lavoie, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The purpose of this study, originally, was to contribute to the completion of a meta-analysis conducted by Mara Wierstra from the University of Virginia. Wierstra had requested individual participant data from two separate studies conducted in our lab: "Acute bouts of assisted cycling improves cognitive and upper extremity movement functions in adolescents with Down syndrome" and "Assisted Cycling Therapy (ACT) improves inhibition in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder." From the data requested, the participants were required to complete three separate tests (i.e., Tower of London, Trail Making Task and the Stroop Test). After compiling the data and sending it to her, we decided to conduct a small meta-analysis of our own, drawing connecting conclusions from the data from the two studies. We concluded that observationally our data suggest an advantage for ACT over voluntary cycling and no cycling across two separate populations (i.e., Autism Spectrum Disorder and Down syndrome), and across different measures of executive function (i.e., Stroop Test, Trail Making Test, and Tower of London). The data suggest that the ACT interventions may promote the upregulation of neurotropic factors leading to neurogenesis in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
ContributorsParker, Cade Joseph (Author) / Ringenbach, Shannon (Thesis director) / Holzapfel, Simon (Committee member) / School of Nutrition and Health Promotion (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
It has been suggested that directed forgetting (DF) in the item-method paradigm results from selective rehearsal of R items and passive decay of F items. However, recent evidence suggested that the passive decay explanation is insufficient. The current experiments examined two theories of DF that assume an active forgetting process: (1) attentional inhibition and (2) tagging and selective search (TSS). Across three experiments, the central tenets of these theories were evaluated. Experiment 1 included encoding manipulations in an attempt to distinguish between these competing theories, but the results were inconclusive. Experiments 2 and 3 examined the theories separately. The results from Experiment 2 supported a representation suppression account of attentional inhibition, while the evidence from Experiment 3 suggested that TSS was not a viable mechanism for DF. Overall, the results provide additional evidence that forgetting is due to an active process, and suggest this process may act to suppress the representations of F items.
ContributorsHansen, Whitney Anne (Author) / Goldinger, Stephen D. (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Brewer, Gene (Committee member) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The present study examined the effects that mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) has on an individual’s episodic memory by looking at participants’ abilities to recall stories both immediately after being verbally told and after a delay. Thirty-seven participants were sorted into a control group (N=27) and a mTBI group (N=10) and then given the Wechsler Memory Scale’s two subtests, Logical Memory I and Logical Memory II. Logical Memory I consists of two verbally given stories in which the participant immediately retells the story to the assessor with as much detail and original vocabulary as they can remember. Logical Memory II has the participants, without prior knowledge, retell the same two stories after a thirty-minute delay. Once recorded, researchers transcribed and scored the participants’ story recalls, gathering data on what errors, correct ideas, and vocabulary the participants made and remembered. The data was then analyzed through an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), looking at the interaction of Story (of the two stories that the participants were told), Group (whether mTBI or control) , and Delay (whether it was the immediate or delayed recall). Trends in the data show that participants with a history of mTBI do more poorly than the control group proving that memory is affected by acquired brain injury and that further studies to examine how and why this is the case are needed.
ContributorsAndrews, Chaley (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis director) / Ratiu, Ileana (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
Adults with a history of traumatic brain injury (TBI) often show deficits in executive functioning, which include the ability to inhibit, switch, and attend to task relevant information. These abilities are also essential for language processing in bilinguals, who constantly inhibit and switch between languages. Currently, there is no data regarding the effect of TBI on executive function and language processing in bilinguals. This study used behavioral and eye-tracking measures to examine the effect of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) on executive function and language processing in Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, thirty-nine healthy bilinguals completed a variety of executive function and language processing tasks. The primary executive function and language processing tasks were paired with a cognitive load task intended to simulate mTBI. In Experiment 2, twenty-two bilinguals with a history of mTBI and twenty healthy control bilinguals completed the same executive function measures and language processing tasks. The results revealed that bilinguals with a history of mTBI show deficits in specific executive functions and have higher rates of language processing deficits than healthy control bilinguals. Additionally, behavioral and eye-tracking data suggest that these language processing deficits are related to underlying executive function abilities. This study also identified a subset of bilinguals who may be at the greater risk of language processing deficits following mTBI. The findings of this study have a direct impact on the identification of executive function deficits and language processing deficits in bilinguals with a history mTBI.
ContributorsRatiu, Ileana (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis advisor) / Goldinger, Stephen D (Committee member) / Liss, Julie M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015