Selective attention deficits following severe closed head injury: the role of inhibitory processes

Heightened distractibility following severe closed head injury (sCHI) may result from a deficit in selective attention. The integrity of inhibitory processes involved in selective attention was assessed through use of a negative priming paradigm, allowing dissociation of inhibitory and episodic retrieval processes. In this task, inhibitory processes are elicited under intact stimulus conditions, whereas episodic retrieval is elicited when target stimuli are degraded. Despite inconsistent evidence of inhibitory deficits following sCHI in the literature, long-term survivors of sCHI showed no negative priming under intact stimulus conditions, providing evidence of compromised inhibitory processing. The sCHI participants' demonstration of negative priming when target stimuli were degraded provides evidence that automatic retrieval processes are intact following sCHI, results that are consistent with prior findings.