Establishing Concurrent Validity of the Role Checklist Version 2 with the OCAIRS in Measurement of Participation: A Pilot Study.

Persons experiencing problems with adaptation following disease, disability, or overwhelming life circumstances are often referred by their physicians to occupational therapists. Given time constraints, therapists may skip administration of a client-centered participation focused assessment and instead use an impairment or limitation focused assessment. This approach assumes that skill remediation will naturally lead to return of participation in valued occupational roles because most participation measures take 30 minutes or longer. In response to the need for an efficient measure of desired role participation, this study establishes concurrent validity of the 10-15-minute Role Checklist Version 2 (RCV2: QP) with the 50 minute Occupational Circumstances Assessment And Rating Scale (OCAIRS) in measuring occupational participation in individuals recovering from surgery following liver transplantation. 20 subjects (mean age of 55 and a mean time-since-transplant of 5.2 months) completed both instruments. The hypothesis was supported (r = .63), showing concurrent validity between the OCAIRS and the RCV2: QP. This provides therapists with an efficient, client-centered measure of occupational participation for a client-centered treatment plan. Using the RCV2: QP in place of the OCAIRS provides a more efficient assessment tool for occupational therapists to set treatment goals and monitor client progress over time.

Prospective memory: effects of divided attention on spontaneous retrieval.

We examined the effects of divided attention on the spontaneous retrieval of a prospective memory intention. Participants performed an ongoing lexical decision task with an embedded prospective memory demand, and also performed a divided-attention task during some segments of lexical decision trials. In all experiments, monitoring was highly discouraged, and we observed no evidence that participants engaged monitoring processes. In Experiment 1, performing a moderately demanding divided-attention task (a digit detection task) did not affect prospective memory performance. In Experiment 2, performing a more challenging divided-attention task (random number generation) impaired prospective memory. Experiment 3 showed that this impairment was eliminated when the prospective memory cue was perceptually salient. Taken together, the results indicate that spontaneous retrieval is not automatic and that challenging divided-attention tasks interfere with spontaneous retrieval and not with the execution of a retrieved intention.