Neuroscience-informed computerized cognitive trainings in patients with schizophrenia healthy ageing individuals

Patients with psychiatric disorders and healthy elderly individuals often suffer from cognitive impairments, which contribute to the worsening of functioning, wellbeing and independence. In the last decade, there has been a focus on digital cognitive trainingsinorderto remediate cognitive deficits. Neuroscience-informed computerized cognitive training is a digital training based on the knowledge of how specific exercises act on the brain and its neuroplasticity. Posit Science has created exercises based on these characteristics, which focus on several sensory modalities, cognitive domains and different levels of complexity. These exercises are based on at- tention, repetition, and reward, the three pillars for effective learning. The efficiency of these trainings has been evidenced in many studies, but we are still searching the most appropriate type of training for a determined category of individuals. In our laboratory, we created two sorts of cognitive trainings to answer these questions. One training was based on sensory modalities for patients with schizophrenia, who often suffer from auditory hallucinations. We tested the effectiveness of an auditory cognitive training compared to its dynamically equivalent visual cognitive training. For the healthy elderly individuals, we created a ‘crescendo’ and ‘decrescendo’ training. The ‘crescendo’ training corresponded to a set of exercises that trained lower-order cognitive functions first and gradually trained higher-order cognitive functions. The ‘decrescendo’ training did the opposite. Wewondered whether the elderly brain would be more plastic if it trained more basic cognitive functions before dealing with more complex functions. Overall, psychiatric patients and elderly individuals benefited from neuroscience-informed cognitive trainings.

Author(s): Linda Scoriels

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