An Executive/Monitoring Treatment Protocol on Everyday Life Activities

Summary

Empirical research shows that deficits in executive/monitoring abilities (inhibition, error detection, problem solving) following acquired brain injury produce serious impact on patient's daily life performance. The authors developed an intervention method aimed at improving "on-line" error detection and correction abilities during performance of naturalistic action. Patients will be asked to complete two significant everyday activities (e.g. making a sandwich and setting the kitchen table for four people) while increasing the level of monitoring requirements as their performance improve. Monitoring requirements increased by presenting new semantically and physically related distractors and increasing the number of conflicting/problem solving situations. The treatment involves a metacognitive contextual intervention program based on providing systematic online/offline-feedback on their own performance, with emphasis on making the patient aware of how to deal with distracting/conflicting situations that were previously failed. The authors predict that errors committed and addressed through the feedback sessions (errors, actions towards distractors, failures to detect/solve conflicting situations) will be reduced on post-intervention performance compared to baseline. The authors also expect behavioral improvements to generalize to trained tasks but adding new distractors/conflicting situations or even to untrained tasks.

Conditions

• Brain Damage
• Executive Dysfunction
• Anosognosia

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Video feedback, Feedback online

The treatment phase have 3 timepoints, 1 the patient is asked to perform an ADL alone, 2. Video feedback is administrated. This requires the participant to watch its own videotaped performance with the therapist while the therapist encourage the participant to identify errors, areas of strength, and to suggest strategies to solve errors in future sessions. 3. feedback online will be provided by the therapist on participant performance. The therapist will wait for the patient to detect and correct their error spontaneously. If the patient does not detect it, the therapist provides unspecified/specific help. This strategy is based on previous work (Schmidt, et al 2013, Ownstorth et al. 2010). The novelty of our procedure is the inclusion of distracting and conflicting/problem solving situations to be inhibited, detected and solved. Feedback will focus on these situations. The level of monitoring requirements will be adjusted to participants performance using a changing criterion design.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Universidad de Granada

  collaborator OTHER

• María Rodríguez Bailón

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• María Jesús Funes- Molina, Professor · University of Granada. Departamento de Psicología Experimental)

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

70 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-11-29

Primary Completion

2020-10-30

Completion

2021-06-28

Countries

• Spain

Study Locations