Sustained attention to response task performance trajectories in Down syndrome

Background: Sustained attention (SA) has been reported to be a unitary construct in youth with Down syndrome (DS), but additional analyses of how auditory and visual SA change over task presentation time are warranted.

Method: The current study was a secondary data analysis employing multilevel modeling. Specifically, we compared auditory and visual sustained attention to response task (SART) performance trajectories within a group of 42 youth with DS aged 10 to 22 years.

Results: We found that auditory omission errors increased at a faster rate than visual omission errors over increasing SART block presentations in youth with DS.

Conclusions: Youth with DS experience more SA lapses over time in the auditory than visual modality. Results have implications for academic instruction and assessment.