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Sustained attention to response task performance trajectories in Down syndrome
G G Faught1, Z M Himmelberger2, A S Tungate1
1Department of Psychology, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA.
Background:
Sustained attention (SA) has been reported to be a unitary construct in youth with Down syndrome (DS), but additional analyses of how auditory and visual SA change over task presentation time are warranted.
Method:
The current study was a secondary data analysis employing multilevel modeling. Specifically, we compared auditory and visual sustained attention to response task (SART) performance trajectories within a group of 42 youth with DS aged 10 to 22 years.
Results:
We found that auditory omission errors increased at a faster rate than visual omission errors over increasing SART block presentations in youth with DS.
Conclusions:
Youth with DS experience more SA lapses over time in the auditory than visual modality. Results have implications for academic instruction and assessment.
