Citation

Ross S, Fantie B, Straus SF, Grafman J. Appl. Neuropsychol. 2001; 8(1): 4-11.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, American University, Washington, DC, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2001, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1207/S15324826AN0801_2

PMID

11388122

Abstract

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients and controls were compared on a variety of mood state, personality, and neuropsychological measures, including memory, word finding, and attentional tasks that required participants to focus, sustain, or divide their attention, or to perform a combination of these functions. CFS patients demonstrated a selective deficit on 3 measures of divided attention. Their performance on the other neuropsychological tests of intelligence, fluency, and memory was no different than that of normal controls despite their reports of generally diminished cognitive capacity. There was an inverse relation between CFS patient fatigue severity and performance on 1 of the divided attention measures. Given these findings, it is probable that CFS patients will report more cognitive difficulties in real-life situations that cause them to divide their effort or rapidly reallocate cognitive resources between 2 response channels (vision and audition).

Language: en