Treatment efficacy

The aim of this paper is to explore patterns of new learning in a group of individuals with aphasia. Participants included eight aphasic and 11 normal, age-matched controls aged between 40 and 84 years. They participated in 6-8 sessions in which the participants completed a lexical-decision task and a simple reaction-time task. The reaction time and accuracy were measured for both tasks. The results reveal greater intersession variability for the aphasic participants for both the reaction time and accuracy data within the lexical decision task. Interestingly, four participants, with aphasia displayed a very high reaction time in session one with a significant reduction in reaction time between sessions one and two. The remaining participants with aphasia and the normal subjects displayed a more gradual improvement in performance. The significant change in performance over sessions 1 and 2 for this group of participants has implications for the representativeness of single-session assessments in clinical and research domains. In general these results suggest that while subjects with aphasia have the capacity to learn new tasks, initial performance may be masked by variables within the process of lexical access

Aphasia · Audiology · Cognitive psychology · Representativeness heuristic · Computer Science · Medicine · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Psychology · Social Psychology