Abstract
One effective cognitive treatment is the rehabilitation of working memory (WM) using an integrated approach that targets the “executive attention” system. Recent neuroscientific literature has revealed that treatment efficacy depends on the presence of various features, such as adaptivity, empathy, customization, avoidance of automatism and stereotypies, and alertness activation. Over the last two decades, an Integrated Cognitive Training (ICT) protocol has been proposed and developed; ICT takes the above-mentioned features and existing literature into account, and has been used to promote the development of reading skills. ICT has been employed in several clinical settings and involves stimulation of a specific deteriorated system (e.g., reading) and the improvement of executive attention components, thus also increasing working memory capacity. In this context, we present two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants diagnosed with dyslexia (aged between 8 and 14 years) underwent two ICT sessions a week, with home supplements, for a duration of 7 months. The participants showed a significant improvement in the reading speed of text, words, and non-words, and in the reading accuracy of text and non-words. In Experiment 2, we replicated Experiment 1, but included a comparison between two groups (experimental group vs. control group) of young participants with diagnosis of dyslexia. The experimental group was subjected to 18 ICT sessions twice a week and with home supplements, using the same protocol as in Experiment 1. The control group was entrusted to the protocol of compensatory tools and dispense/helping procedures provided by the scholastic Personalized Educational Plan. After training, the experimental group gained about 0.5 syllables per second in text reading, and a marked decrease in error rate. The control group showed no significant improvement in reading skills after the same period. Moreover, the improvement observed in the experimental group remained stable 4 months after ICT had ended. The results of these two experiments support the efficacy of the integrated ICT protocol in improving reading skills in children with dyslexia and its sustained effect.
Highlights
One cognitive treatment that has been shown to be effective is an integrated approach that combines rehabilitation of working memory (WM) with that of the executive attention system
No statistical significative difference was found between QI (Raven Matrices expressed in percentiles) and speed increase of reading: N = 20, Spearman’s rho = 0.022, p = 0.926
Tressoldi et al found that the annual natural growth rate of reading speed in Italian children with dyslexia is around 0.3 syll/s for words and text and 0.14 syll/s for non-words
Summary
One cognitive treatment that has been shown to be effective is an integrated approach that combines rehabilitation of working memory (WM) with that of the executive attention system. The expression “working memory” can be misunderstood due to changes and improvements to the initial models of WM, which have evolved alongside neuroscientific discoveries in the field. This evolution has been mainly characterized by a clearer definition of the executive control system. The executive control system was initially described rather vaguely as a “central processor” (e.g., Baddeley and Hitch, 1974), but, over time, it acquired a clearer evidence-based framework. WM models have changed over time, and have moved toward a greater convergence (e.g., Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Cowan, 1988; Engle et al, 1999; Cowan et al, 2002). The more widely shared and clearly defined system in this theoretical evolution is the central executive, which is a multicomponent system that includes several known and unknown executive-attentive functions (Engle and Kane, 2004; Repovš and Baddeley, 2006; Hofmann et al, 2011)
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