Sustained attention in children: comparing children with chronic diseases or conditions with their healthy peers.

Abstract

Sustained attention is an often studied cognitive domain. It is one of the basic cognition functions in humans and necessary for many skills in the development of a child. In the past, research in sustained attention has been done with healthy children and children with a specific chronic disease. In this study, children with all kinds of chronic diseases or conditions are compared with healthy children using a digitalised version of the Bourdon-Vos test. Based on this test, it has been found that children with a chronic disease or condition perform less on the test and have a decline in detection rate over time compared to healthy peers. However, no differences in speed have been found between the two groups.