Visual Perception in Traumatic Brain Injury: Effects of Severity and Effort

• Main Author: Aguerrevere, Luis
• Format: Others
• Published: ScholarWorks@UNO 2007
• Subjects: Traumatic Brain Injury; Visual Perception; Perceptual Organizational Index; Block Design; Picture Completion; Matrix Reasoning; Rey Osterrieth Complex Figure; Benton Facial Recognition Test; Effort; Malingering; Neuropsychological assessment.
• Online Access: http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/835; http://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1639&context=td

Previous studies have found that poor effort can significantly impact psychometric performance by Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) patients. So far, this impact has been relatively well studied in attention and memory. However, this is not the case for visual perception functions. Thus, the goal of this study was to determine to what extent TBI severity affect visual perception after controlling for effort. Results showed that mild TBI good effort group did not differ from a demographically matched control group. In contrast, a mild TBI poor effort group, a moderate-severe TBI group and a right hemisphere cerebro-vascular (CVA) group performed worse than the mild TBI good effort group and the control group. The results suggest a dose response relationship between injury severity and visual perception performance. After controlling for effort, results indicated that moderate-severe TBI, but not mild TBI, has long lasting effects on visual perception. Clinical implications are discussed.