Verbal selective learning after traumatic brain injury in children

Selective learning (SL), the ability to select items to learn from among other items, engages cognitive control, which is purportedly mediated by the frontal cortex and its circuitry. Using incentive-based auditory word recall and expository discourse tasks, we studied the efficiency of SL in children ages 6 to 16 years who had sustained severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) at least 1 year earlier. We hypothesized that SL would be compromised by severe TBI. Results indicated that children with severe TBI performed significantly worse than age-matched typically developing children on word- and discourse-level measures of SL efficiency with no significant group differences in number of items recalled from auditory word lists or declarative facts. We conclude that severe TBI disrupts incentive-based cognitive control processes, possibly due to involvement of frontal neural networks.