Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2004
Studies have found that infection with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) leads to cognitive dysfunction. In fact, attention problems have been reported to be the most frequent cognitive symptom in HIV-infected adults. One question is how early in the course of information processing can attention impairment be detected? To address this issue, performance on a perceptual span task was examined in 54 HIV-infected adults and 19 seronegative controls. In this task a target had to be identified in a briefly presented (50 ms) array of 1, 4, or 12 letter-characters. Response accuracy was differentially worse in the HIV+ group relative to seronegative controls in the most difficult condition, the 12-item array, but not in the easier conditions. There was no evidence of a group difference in response strategy due to disinhibition or in psychomotor speed. These data suggest that HIV infection leads to a reduction in early visual processing capacity (or span of apprehension). The present results illustrate a new type of attentional deficit in HIV and show the impact of HIV on cognition at an earlier point in information processing than has been previously reported. (JINS, 2004, 10, 135–140.)
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.