A further study on the sustained attention response to task (SART): the effect of age, gender and education

The present study aimed to investigate the potential effect of age, gender and education upon the theoretically sound measure of sustained attention--Sustained Attention Response to Task (SART)--amongst a control sample and patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). The SART is a simple and brief computer-assisted programme for assessing sustained attention over a short period of time. Two further studies on the use of the SART among the Hong Kong Chinese were conducted. In particular, experiment 1 recruited a control group to study the potential impact of age, education, and gender upon the performance of the SART. Experiment 2 was aimed to establish the discriminative validity of the SART upon the attentional slip in a larger sample of patients with TBI and the normal controls. The potential impact of age, gender, and education upon the SART performance was found to be minimal. In keeping with previous studies, the present findings demonstrate that SART is able to discriminate the patients with TBI from normal controls.