CREC: the role of serious games in improving flexibility in thinking in neuropsychological rehabilitation

Abstract

An exploratory study aimed at testing CREC, a training programme designed for people with cognitive impairments caused by a stroke, is reported. The goal of the programme is to improve flexibility in thinking through a creative approach based on everyday problems. The programme includes two Serious Games (SGs) developed ad hoc, dealing with the transfer of the learned strategies to the home environment. The training was applied to six patients to test if it could bring beneficial effects to them. Before and after the training, patients’ neuropsychological functioning, emotional state and level of creativity were assessed. Results showed improvements in memory, logical reasoning and praxic skills. Improvements in quality of life and in creativity emerged as well. At the end of the training, the patients perceived themselves as more efficient in problem solving and recognised that the SGs led them to reflect critically on some aspects of their daily life that they usually took for granted.

Divergent Thinking Abilities in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Mini-Review

“…Finally, it is worth noting that recognizing the specific neurofunctional underpinnings (i.e., critical brain areas and cognitive functions) associated with DT through in-depth assessments of FTD patients could also have some important practical implications. In particular, this could help researchers to implement cognitive stimulation programs through DT tasks to improve cognitive functioning in both healthy older adults (see, e.g., Fusi et al, 2020b) and patients with various neurological or neurodegenerative diseases (Colautti et al, 2018;Ruggiero et al, 2019), especially in the early stages (Hart and Wade, 2006;Fusi et al, 2020a).…”

Creative Thinking in Tourette's Syndrome: An Uncharted Topic

“…It has been claimed that creativity plays a crucial role when individuals are challenged, for instance because of neurodevelopmental disorders (Cancer et al, 2016), cognitive impairments (Fusi et al, 2020), brain damages (Colautti et al, 2018), and mental decline associated to aging (Colombo et al, 2018). Original ways to overcome the problems associated to these conditions, when the usual strategies fail, can be found.…”

A Comparison of Divergent Thinking Abilities Between Healthy Elderly Subjects and MCI Patients: Preliminary Findings and Implications

“…ATTA is the abbreviated form of the famous Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (Torrance, 1988), which is the instrument that is most widely used by researchers to assess creativity and its reliability and predictive validity have been already proved (see Kim, 2006 for a review). ATTA was chosen due to the time limitation in clinical practice; it requires a short time for administration and had already been used in the Italian clinical context by Canesi et al (2016Canesi et al ( , 2017 and Colautti et al (2018). This test consists of three different tasks: the first is a verbal task, also called "consequences, " in which subjects are asked to list all the problems that could arise following an implausible situation assumed to be true such as "if you could fly or walk on air without being on an airplane or in a similar vehicle."…”

“…However, to our knowledge, no research has studied DT abilities in patients affected by MCI, which is generally considered to be a transitional stage between normal and pathological aging (see Petersen, 2016 for a review) or as a prodromal stage of the onset of Alzheimer's disease (AD, Petersen et al, 2001). This assessment might be particularly important when considering data on the prevalence and conversion rate to dementia in MCI patients; indeed, even if these data vary greatly according to the different definitional applied criteria (Bischkopf et al, 2002), epidemiological studies have estimated that the prevalence of MCI in the elderly population ranges from 3 to 19% (Gauthier et al, 2006;Colautti et al, 2018) and that 11 to 49% of people with MCI progressed to dementia (mainly AD) within 2 years (Gauthier et al, 2006;Bondi et al, 2014). Therefore, it is considered a priority to find early cognitive markers for the diagnosis of MCI (see, for example, Arnáiz and Almkvist, 2003) and also to develop training and cognitive stimulation programs that might help these patients to compensate for their cognitive difficulties.…”