Computerised working-memory focused cognitive remediation therapy for psychosis — A preliminary study

Computerised working memory‐based cognitive remediation therapy does not affect Reading the Mind in The Eyes test performance or neural activity during a Facial Emotion Recognition test in psychosis

“…The first group involved in this study participated in a pilot study, in which we examined the feasibility of an 8‐week working memory CT programme (Hargreaves et al., ) ( N = 38, 18 participants who completed CT and 20 participants who were assigned to the control group). The second group participated in a randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the same 8‐week working memory CT programme in order to investigate the effectiveness of this programme in treating cognitive deficits in psychosis (Donohoe et al., ) ( N = 52, 25 CT participants and 27 control group participants).…”

“…The second group participated in a randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the same 8‐week working memory CT programme in order to investigate the effectiveness of this programme in treating cognitive deficits in psychosis (Donohoe et al., ) ( N = 52, 25 CT participants and 27 control group participants). Combining these samples allowed us to examine performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (Eyes test) in a larger sample ( N = 90), that is 43 CT participants and 47 control group participants (Dillon et al., ; Donohoe et al., ; Hargreaves et al., ). The Eyes test is an established measure of mental state decoding in which participants must determine what a person is thinking from a black‐and‐white photograph of the eye region of the face (Baron‐Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, ).…”

“…This study used an online CT programme that specifically targets working memory and was developed by our group (Dillon et al., ; Donohoe et al., ; Hargreaves et al., ; McAvinue et al., ). The programme consisted of education on working memory, strategy‐based learning and practice of nine working memory training exercises.…”

“…We recently developed a computerised CT programme for psychosis targeting working memory (Hargreaves et al., ), which was associated with improvements across a range of cognitive functions including working memory, episodic memory and performance intelligence quotient (IQ), as well as improvements in social functioning and increased resting‐state functional brain connectivity across frontal and parietal regions, assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; Donohoe et al., ). In doing so, our findings supported evidence from working memory training programmes in other populations where training was associated with a transfer of benefits to other cognitive domains, included greater efficiency of stimulus processing and increased attention capacity (Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, & Perrig, ; Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Perrig, & Meier, ; Kundu, Sutterer, Emrich, & Postle, ; Lilienthal, Tamez, Shelton, Myerson, & Hale, ; Rudebeck, Bor, Ormond, O'Reilly, & Lee, ; Salminen, Strobach, & Schubert, ).…”

“…Although focussed on working memory, important social and emotional elements were present in our CT programme, for example, the programme including repeated exposure to facial stimuli: the Faces Snap training task required patients to carefully watch a series of photographs of human faces and press a button when two appeared in a row, and the Focus Faces training task required patients to remember the last two from a series of faces (Hargreaves et al., ). Although the training purpose of these tasks was not on emotion recognition, given that some of the facial stimuli presented emotional expressions (e.g., smiling), it is likely that the stimuli used engaged affect recognition processes.…”