Effects of distraction upon reaction time performance in brain-damaged and alcoholic patients

Abstract

Normal, brain-damaged and chronic alcoholic patients were given a continous visual reaction time task with interpolated tones just prior to the visual stimulus. The distraction tone produced a significantly greater reaction time performance decrement in the brain-damaged patients than in the normals or alcoholics. The brain-damaged group's enhanced distraction was primarily due to persistence of the distraction effect with repeated tone trials; the normals and alcoholics showed no distraction effect from the tone after the first trial or two. These results were discussed in terms of more general attention and habituation deficits in brain-damaged patients.