Intellectual disability: recovering executive skills with virtual reality

The importance of virtual reality in people with intellectual disabilities in improving executive skills. This is the result of research directed by Paola Marangolo, Full Professor at the Department of Humanities, University Federico II, in collaboration with the Experimental Aphasia Laboratory of Turin sponsored by the Carlo Molo Onlus Foundation, directed by Dr. Alberto Giachero.

The study entitled "Procedural Learning through Action Observation: Preliminary Evidence from Virtual Gardening Activity in Intellectual Disability" published in the international journal Brain Sciences involved 14 people with varying degrees of intellectual disability from birth.

Intellectual disability impairs intellectual and adaptive functioning. It is a clinical condition that appears early in development. The etiology may depend on several risk factors. Genetic factors include chromosomal or hereditary diseases, while nongenetic causes may occur prenatally (chromosomal diseases, congenital errors of metabolism, brain malformations, and maternal diseases), perinatally (labor or delivery-related events leading to neonatal encephalopathy), and postnatally (hypoxia, infections, brain injury, seizure disorders, toxic-metabolic intoxication) factors.

 

People with intellectual disabilities show difficulty in performing complex activities (e.g., shopping, cooking, gardening) with loss of independence in daily life.

The only remedy to help these people improve their abilities is to program intensive rehabilitation pathways focused on recovering impaired abilities.

Neuroscientific research clearly indicates that rehabilitation is most effective if it is carried out in settings that simulate real-world situations.

In the present study, 14 guests with intellectual disabilities from the Villa Lauro community of the Agape Foundation of the Holy Spirit in Turin were involved in an experimental cognitive training aimed at learning gardening procedures. The subjects were required to observe a virtual reconstruction of a vegetable garden in the community that projected on a virtual screen the procedures necessary to grow zucchini. At the same time they were required to perform cognitive exercises to retrieve the tools useful for cultivation and interact with each other by commenting on the observed scenes.

 

The use of virtual reality facilitated learning the gardening procedure by proving to be a more effective tool than the workshops implemented in the real-world setting and previously attended by the 14 subjects involved in the experimental research.

After fourteen weeks of treatment, carried out twice a week, all participants were able to use the learned gardening procedures in the real-world context while also improving their cognitive abilities measured before and after treatment on tests of attention, spatial learning and planning.

"The study starts from the theory of Embodied Cognition or 'embodied knowledge' now well established in neuroscience. According to this perspective , " explains Professor Paola Marangolo, " there is a relationship between the cognitive system and the sensorimotor system: language, memory, attention, and executive functions are partly controlled by the motor system, as they are mediated by motor actions. Virtual reality, by providing immersion within real-life environments, activates the sensorimotor system and, as a result, facilitates the recovery of cognitive abilities."

"Our work," says Professor Marangolo, "paves the way for new neurorehabilitation frontiers. Given the severity of the pathology and the negative impact that intellectual disabilities determine on a social, psychological and communicative level, we believe that our results may indicate the need to implement in differently abled people rehabilitation paths that are as real and contextually motivating as possible in order to consider the ecological impact of rehabilitation in everyday life skills."