THE EFFECTS OF BRAIN STEM COMPRESSION ON ATTENTION AND MEMORY.
Item
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Title
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THE EFFECTS OF BRAIN STEM COMPRESSION ON ATTENTION AND MEMORY.
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Identifier
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AAI8611348
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identifier
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8611348
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Creator
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GREENBLATT, RENA MATISON.
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Contributor
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Jeffrey Rosen
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Date
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1986
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Experimental | Psychology, Psychobiology
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Abstract
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This thesis evaluated attention and memory in 26 patients with posterior fossa tumors of varying sizes. It was hypothesized that compression of brain stem structures--specifically, of the reticular activating system--by large tumors would lead to impairments in attention and memory.;Psychometric and behavioral measures were administered to the patients first pre-operatively and then five to seven months after the surgical removal of the tumor. Since tumor size was expected to play a significant role, the patients were divided into a small tumor group and a large tumor group. Control subjects were also evaluated in order to assess practice effects.;Three competing hypotheses were explored. First, the tumor impairs auditory-perceptual processing and consequently the encoding of information; second, brain stem compression from large tumors affects only the memory processes, without affecting perceptual or attentional functioning; and third, brain stem compression interferes with both the attention and the memory processes.;The results supported the third hypothesis that both attention and memory are affected; auditory-perceptual processing was not found to be impaired for either patient group. The large tumor group's pre-operative performance on measures of attention and memory was significantly worse than that of both the small tumor group and the controls. Moreover, of the three groups, only the large tumor group showed significant improvement post-operatively on measures of these functions. This suggests that it was the compression of the brain stem--not tissue damage--that led to the cognitive deficits. Had the deficits been caused by tissue damage, the impairments would have been permanent.;Of the standard psychological models examined in this thesis, the "controlled versus automatic processing" model was found to be most consistent with the current findings. Controlled versus automatic processing purports that there is a limited capacity available for attention. Based on the current findings, those tasks that showed pre-operative impairment and post-operative improvement require conscious effort for retrieval of a span of information. Since there is a limited attentional capacity, these tasks are most sensitive to an impairment. Future research is discussed in which the effect of span of information on attentional capacity could be assessed.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
