Poster Session 06 Program Schedule
02/15/2024
04:00 pm - 05:15 pm
Room: Majestic Complex (Posters 61-120)
Poster Session 06: Aging | MCI | Neurodegenerative Disease - PART 2
Final Abstract #96
The Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Attentional Blink Paradigm in Aphasia
Christina Sen, San Diego State University / University of California, San Diego, San Diego, United States
JoAnn Silkes, San Diego State University, San Diego, United States
Category: Language and Speech Functions/Aphasia
Keyword 1: aphasia
Keyword 2: attention
Keyword 3: cognitive processing
Objective:
Aphasia is an acquired language disorder, typically following damage in the left hemisphere of the brain. Research has demonstrated that people with aphasia (PWA) also experience domain-general cognitive deficits. Aphasia has been hypothesized to involve an impairment in the interface between the language a person is aware of (explicit) and the unconscious processes supporting language use (implicit). One tool to investigate this interface is the Attentional Blink (AB), which indexes the ability to explicitly engage implicit information. In an AB task, a rapid stream of letters is presented to participants. A blink occurs when participants attempt to attend to two targets (T1 and T2) and they miss T2 when it occurs too soon after T1.
The AB has not been explored in PWA, and it is unknown whether PWA will show similar attention shifting to unimpaired adults. Additionally, it is unknown whether differences in attention shifting in PWA would be different for linguistic stimuli (i.e., letters) compared to non-linguistic stimuli (i.e., shapes), which may also be susceptible if domain-general processes are impaired.
Participants and Methods:
We recruited 13 age-matched controls (AMC) and 13 people with aphasia. All individuals participated in both a Linguistic condition (using letters) and a Non-Linguistic condition (using simple shapes). In both conditions, there were 3 separate tasks:
- Task 1 – a dual task to assess attentional blink. Participants identified the white letter/shape (T1) and determine the presence/absence of a black X/triangle (T2) among distractors. For experimental trials, the amount of time between T1 and T2 was varied, resulting in 6 different intervals.
- Task 2 – a single task comparison to Task 1. Participants identified the white letter/shape.
- Task 3 – a processing speed task. Participants identified the black X/triangle at varying presentation rates.
Results:
Statistical analyses (i.e., d’ ratio and ANOVA) indicated significant differences in the attentional blink between PWA and controls when accounting for stimulus type (F1,20 = 9.24 , p < 0.01). Both groups increased in accuracy as the intervals between T1 and T2 increased. In the Linguistic condition, the PWA were less accurate overall compared to controls. In the Non-Linguistic condition, both groups showed poor accuracy.
The results from Task 3 revealed that the PWA performed significantly worse than controls across the conditions (X2(1, N = 26) = 5.16, p = 0.02) in terms of processing speed and that both groups showed decreased accuracy in the Non-Linguistic condition (X2(1, N = 26) = 18.1, p < 0.001). In post-hoc analyses, the PWA’s performance on a naming task significantly predicted Task 3 accuracy (X2(1, N = 26) = 5.40, p = 0.02).
Conclusions:
As demonstrated by their impaired attentional blink in the Linguistic condition, people with aphasia do demonstrate difficulties with attention shifting compared to controls. These results have implications for understanding the influence of attentional engagement on language processing in aphasia. Additionally, our results suggest that language impairments in aphasia may be related to deficits in processing speed.
Future research should further explore how non-linguistic attentional shifting and processing speed is affected in aphasia.
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