Divided attention years after severe closed head injury: the effect of dependencies between the subtasks

Lesions of white matter which connects distant brain areas are characteristic for closed head injury (CHI). It was predicted that this impairs divided attention only if dependent subtasks are used which require communication between corresponding brain processes. Fourteen chronic severe CHI patients (mean age 42 years) and 14 healthy controls, matched on age, gender, and education, participated in an experiment on divided attention. A typical left hemisphere task and a typical right hemisphere task must be simultaneously performed in a condition where they are completely independent and in conditions with dependencies between the tasks. Only in the dependent conditions the CHI group showed poor divided attention performance.