How difficult is it? How well Adults with Aphasia Perceive Task Demands

Christensen, Stephanie Cotton and Wright, Heather Harris (2014) How difficult is it? How well Adults with Aphasia Perceive Task Demands. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

Researchers investigating self-ratings of task difficulty and effort allocated to lexical decision tasks in adults with aphasia indicated a mismatch between their perceptions and behavioral performance (e.g. Clark & Robin, 1995; Murray et al., 1997a; Murray et al., 1997b). That is, although participants with aphasia performed more poorly on the language tasks, they did not rate the tasks as more difficult (Murray et al., 1997a, 1997b) or as requiring more effort (Clark & Robin, 1995) compared to control participants. Murray et al., (1997a) reported that this impaired relationship between performance and perceptions was only found for difficulty ratings and not for ratings of perceived accuracy, leading them to conclude that individuals with aphasia are impaired in their ability to perceive the demands of the tasks. The purpose of the current study was to extend these findings by including both pre- and post-task ratings of difficulty for verbal and spatial tasks. We hypothesized that if participants with aphasia are misperceiving the demands of the tasks, the relationship between performance and ratings of difficulty would be less for the pre-task ratings compared to the post-task ratings. Comparing the relationship between difficulty ratings and performance on non-verbal (spatial) and verbal tasks would further reveal whether any deficits in perceiving the task demands are specific to verbal stimuli or a domain-general deficit in evaluating task demands.

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