Adolescent Medicine & Child Psychology

Biography

Biography: Anna Orylska

Abstract

Computerized training typically focuses on increasing short-term memory and working memory skills using adaptive procedures that are delivered across multiple 30-40 minute sessions each week for adolescent and adults. Task difficulty is typically adjusted automatically to performance across sessions to maximize learning at the boundaries of an individual’s competence. Several recent reviews of research in working memory training have questioned the viability of existing training programs to impact core symptoms and improve daily functioning in individuals diagnosed with ADHD. These have highlighted the lack of scientific rigour in existing studies. In addition, they have raised concerns around goodness of fit that reflects the heterogeneous symptom profile in ADHD. For example, researchers have concluded that the results of WM training studies are inconsistent because of inadequate controls and ineffective measures to understand change in core cognitive functioning. Traditional approaches that aim to understand the effects of training is pre-post- tests outcome measures. Investigating learning trajectories in a computerized working memory training (WMT) is a novel approach to understand the effectiveness of computerized cognitive training. We explored in our study whether growth mixture modelling (GMM) could identify different trajectories of learning efficiency during a WMT for children with ADHD, compared with a typically developing group, and if learning trajectories and outcomes were different for simple and complex training tasks.The comparison between the more traditional approach and the approach presented by learning trajectories may explore who would benefit most from computerized cognitive training.