Visuospatial, Visuoperceptual and Visuoconstructing abilities in Traumatic Brain Injury: The effects of injury severity and effort
Abstract
The study’s objective was to determine the effects of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) on visuospatial, visuoperceptual and visuoconstructing skills while controlling for effort. TBI cases were classified by injury severity as mild or moderate-severe, and by effort measured based on performance on four validity-indicators. TBI cases were also compared to demographically-matched healthy control subjects. Visuospatial, visuoperceptual and visuoconstructing abilities scores were obtained from the performance on five common neuropsychological tests: Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure, Benton Facial Test as well as Matrix Reasoning, Picture Completion and Block Design from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Test-III. Patients classified as mild TBI good effort demonstrated no meaningful impairments in the visual skills tests. Those classified as moderate-severe TBI and mild TBI poor-effort demonstrated moderate impairments in these same skills. Therefore, effort aside, a dose-response effect was obtained between injury severity and visuospatial, visuoperceptual and visuoconstructing performance. Poor effort was responsible for visual skills impairments in mild TBI. As a result, it is important to extensively test motivational factors in mTBI before attributing impairments in visuospatial, visuoperceptual and visuoconstructing neuropsychological tests to brain damage.References
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