Dual Task Performance in Huntington’s Disease Using Cancellation and Auditory Tasks
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1
Monash University, School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Australia
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2
Monash Medical Centre, Department of Neurology, Australia
We examined dual task performance in Huntington’s disease (HD). Fourteen participants with early stage HD and 14 age-matched controls performed visual cancellation and auditory tasks, each at two difficulty levels (easy, hard). For the cancellation task, participants were required to circle the target letter O on a sheet of paper that contained distractor letters. The easy condition used other letters of the alphabet, whereas the hard condition used letters that were visually similar to the target (e.g., Q). For the auditory task, participants were required to report the number of high-pitched sounds from a series of either all high-pitched sounds (easy) or a combination of high- and low-pitched (hard) sounds. We found that participants with HD were significantly slower and less accurate in the cancellation task compared to controls, and their performance deteriorated with greater task difficulty. These findings may be attributable to the greater visuospatial demands of the hard cancellation task that required cancelling out target letters among distractor letters with which they shared common features.
Keywords:
Huntington's disease,
Dual Task Performance,
cancellation task,
Reaction Time,
divided attention
Conference:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 Nov - 2 Dec, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Attention
Citation:
Vaportzis
E,
Georgiou-Karistianis
N,
Churchyard
A and
Stout
J
(2012). Dual Task Performance in Huntington’s Disease Using Cancellation and Auditory Tasks.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.208.00107
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Received:
21 Sep 2012;
Published Online:
07 Nov 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Ms. Eleftheria Vaportzis, Monash University, School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Melbourne, VIC, 3800, Australia, riavapo@gmail.com