Serial attention involves adopting a task set (or intention to do a task), maintaining that set for a time, then shifting set. When set must be shifted often, serial attention is difficult because old sets cannot be forgotten instantly and will interfere with the current one. This memory perspective on set shifting is the basis for a computational cognitive model that explains a variety of effe...

The authors’ goals in this article are to (a) describe a new task for the assessment of shifting attention between different affective stimuli, The Children’s Attentional Shifting Task (CAST); (b) present the theoretical background for the development of the CAST; and (c) report initial information on the developmental appropriateness and validity of the CAST. The task was tested using a sample...

The very few cognitive training studies targeting an important executive function, set shifting, have reported performance improvements that also generalized to untrained tasks. The present randomized controlled trial extends set shifting training research by comparing previously used cued training with uncued training. A computerized adaptation of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test was utilized a...

BACKGROUND Task shifting is a common strategy to deliver antiretroviral therapy (ART) in resource-limited settings and is safe and effective if implemented appropriately. Consensus among stakeholders is necessary to formulate clear national policies that maintain high-quality care. We sought to understand key stakeholders' opinions regarding task shifting of HIV care in Mozambique and to charac...

A network of prefrontal and parietal regions has been implicated in executive control processes. However, the extent to which individual regions within this network are engaged in component control processes, such as inhibition of task-irrelevant stimulus attributes or shifting (switching) between attentional foci, remains controversial. Participants (N=17) underwent functional magnetic resonan...

BACKGROUND Lower-income countries face severe health worker shortages. Recent evidence suggests that this problem can be mitigated by task-shifting--delegation of aspects of health care to less specialized health workers. We estimated the potential impact of task-shifting on costs of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and physician supply in Uganda. The study was performed at the Infectious Diseases ...

Attention shifting in the working memory system plays an important role in goal-oriented behavior, such as reading, reasoning, and driving, because it involves several cognitive processes. This study identified brain activity leading to individual differences in attention shifting for dual-task performance by using the group comparison approach. A large-scale pilot study was initially conducted...

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) often suffer from cognitive impairments, including set-shifting deficits, in addition to the characteristic motor symptoms. It is hypothesized that the striatal dopamine depletion leads to a sub-optimal functional connectivity between task-related brain areas and consequently results in impaired task-performance. In this study, we aimed to examine this hyp...

BACKGROUND While the impact of task shifting on quality of care and clinical outcomes has been demonstrated in several studies, evidence on its impact on the health system as a whole is limited. This study has two main objectives. The first is to conceptualize the wider range of effects of task shifting through a systems thinking lens. The second is to explore these effects using task shifting ...