Working memory impairments in children and adolescents after traumatic brain injury

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) in children has been reported to result in deficits in a range of cognitive functions. Severity of injury, time since injury, and age at injury are some of the determinants of the range and extent of the cognitive deficits. Little prospective data exists on the extent of impairment of working memory (WM), specifically central executive (CE) functioning after TBI, and whether such an impairment immediately post injury lessens over time. The present study examined the WM functioning on 38 TBI children and adolescents (24 mild TBI and 14 moderate-severe TBI) aged 7-16 years, at 1 and 6- months post-TBI. Their performance on novel WM tasks was compared to their performance on other (non-WM) cognitive tasks to examine whether there was any differential change in WM functioning over time. The TBI group was further compared to the performance of a matched control group of 60 children and adolescents tested on the whole battery of cognitive tasks twice, five months apart.