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Abstract:
Abstract: Affiliation: The frontal lobes of the human brain
are purported to be the location of a Central Executive System
(CES) which orchestrates and coordinates verbal and spatial
information simultaneously. Individuals with frontal lobe injuries
have demonstrated deficits in performance during concurrent tasks.
Alan Baddeley's paper and pencil working memory dual task was used
to investigate simultaneous verbal and spatial processing
performance in brain injured children. Twenty frontal lesioned
children and twenty matched controls aged 7 to 15 were required to
repeat numbers at maximum digit span length (verbal) and cross as
many boxes (spatial tracking) as possible for two minutes. The
tasks were performed first separately and then simultaneously. As
predicted, frontal lesioned children performed more poorly than did
the control children. Frontal lesioned children demonstrated
significant deficits in digit span performance during the
simultaneous task condition. Exploring whether the results were due
to brain injury in general, or frontal injury in particular, five
temporal lesioned children were compared to the frontal lesioned
group. The frontal lesioned group performed more poorly than did
the temporal lesioned children, demonstrating sensitivity of
frontal lobe damage to dual tasks that require simultaneous
cognitive processing. Children under the age of 12 in all groups
were significantly slower than the older children in tracking
during the dual task condition.
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