Study Status: Recruiting
Recruit Status: Recruiting
Study Type: Interventional
Official Title: Using Working Memory Training to Rehabilitate Unilateral Visual Neglect
Brief Summary:
Purpose: Stroke is a common cause of death and disability in Canada. Injury to the right hemisphere of the brain and the parietal cortex in particular, is common and results in a disorder known as 'neglect' in 40% to 95% of patients. These patients fail to attend to or respond to events occurring in left space; the disorder is devastating for the patient and their caregivers with the patient becoming dependent on assistance for most activities of daily life (ADLs).
The project will implement two visual working memory (VWM) training programs to explore the influence of VWM training on neglect symptoms as well as activities of daily life.
Hypothesis: It is hypothesised that SWM training protocols will lead to improvements of neglect symptoms as well as improvement in ADLs.
The project will develop a novel rehabilitation strategy for treating the neglect syndrome.
Evidence from research in healthy participants employing video games to improve cognition along with research using working memory training protocols showing a broad range of benefits accruing to both trained and untrained tasks, suggests that the investigators approach has great potential to improve the core deficits of the neglect syndrome. Thus, WM training represents a promising avenue for rehabilitating neglect patients who demonstrate core deficits in both spatial attention and VWM to be highly interrelated functions.