When dyslexic college students trained with CogniFit Personal Coach, their brain activity, working memory and reading performance were shown to increase significantly, and results lasted up to six months after training. The case study was conducted by Tzipi Horowitz-Kras and Zvia Breznitz at the Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the study of Learning Disabilities, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Mr. Ferguson, co-founder of Navon, the master distributor of CogniFit programs in Australasia said "This is another example of how our high-quality training programs can build a better connected brain in order to improve the quality of peoples lives. The improvements in reading comprehension achieved with dyslexic adults has also been noted in a case study involving primary school children (not dyslexic) using MindFit Whiz Kids - the version of the program designed specifically for primary school children. We are very excited about the potential that cognitive training has in the educational space for both children an adults".
The Abstract for the study is below and the full study can be downloaded from navon's website www.navon.com.au
Abstract
Background:
Based on the relationship between working memory and error detection, we investigated the capacity of adult dyslexic readers' working memory to change as a result of training, and the impact of training on the error detection mechanism.
Methodology:
27 dyslexics and 34 controls, all university students, participated in the study. ERP methodology and behavioural measures were employed prior to, and immediately after, and 6 months after training. The CogniFit Personal Coach program, which consists of 24 sessions of direct training pf working memory skills, was used.
Findings:
Both groups of readers gained from the training program but the dyslexic readers gained significantly more. In the dyslexic group, digit span increased from 9.84+-3.15 to 10.79+-3.03. Working memory training significantly increased the number of words per minute read correctly by 14.73%. Adult brain activity changed as a result of training, evidenced by an increase in working memory capacity and the amplitude of the Error-related Negativity (ERN) component (24.71%). When ERN amplitude increased, the percentage of errors in the Sternberg tests decreased.
Conclusions:
We suggest that by expanding the working memory capacity, larger units of information are retained in the system, enabling more effective detection. The crucial functioning of the central-executive as a sub-component is also discussed.
