Cerrato, Antonio (2020) Innovative Methodologies and Technologies for Training and Assessment of Cognitive Functions Based on Peripersonal Visuospatial Behaviors. [Tesi di dottorato]

[thumbnail of CERRATO_ANTONIO_32.pdf]
Preview
Text
CERRATO_ANTONIO_32.pdf

Download (5MB) | Preview
Item Type: Tesi di dottorato
Resource language: Italiano
Title: Innovative Methodologies and Technologies for Training and Assessment of Cognitive Functions Based on Peripersonal Visuospatial Behaviors
Creators:
Creators
Email
Cerrato, Antonio
antonio.cerrato@unina.it
Date: 12 March 2020
Number of Pages: 144
Institution: Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Department: Studi Umanistici
Dottorato: Mind, gender and languages
Ciclo di dottorato: 32
Coordinatore del Corso di dottorato:
nome
email
Bacchini, Dario
dario.bacchini@unina.it
Tutor:
nome
email
Miglino, Orazio
UNSPECIFIED
Bartolomeo, Paolo
UNSPECIFIED
Ricci, Carlo
UNSPECIFIED
Date: 12 March 2020
Number of Pages: 144
Keywords: Cognitive Functions; Visuospatial Cognition; Psychological Assessment; Tangible User Interface; Augmented Reality
Settori scientifico-disciplinari del MIUR: Area 11 - Scienze storiche, filosofiche, pedagogiche e psicologiche > M-PSI/01 - Psicologia generale
Area 11 - Scienze storiche, filosofiche, pedagogiche e psicologiche > M-PSI/03 - Psicometria
Area 11 - Scienze storiche, filosofiche, pedagogiche e psicologiche > M-PSI/04 - Psicologia dello sviluppo e psicologia dell'educazione
Date Deposited: 22 Mar 2020 11:19
Last Modified: 08 Nov 2021 12:22
URI: http://www.fedoa.unina.it/id/eprint/13132

Collection description

This thesis aims to illustrate a prototype for the assessment of cognitive functions, in particular visuospatial skills. Visuospatial skills allow us to interact within the surrounding environment, acquiring information about the spatial relationships of the objects and permitting us to correctly orientate ourselves between more-or-less known places and paths. Spatial cognition deficits can have dramatic repercussions in people's lives, such as in the case of Unilateral Spatial Neglect (USN), a spatial lateralization disorder due to posterior lesions of the right hemisphere, which alters the perception and the processing of stimuli placed in the left hemispace. For a correct assessment of visuospatial disorders, psychologists often make use of diagnostic procedures based on the administration of classic psychological paper-and-pencil tests, that are those paper-based instruments that, whilst counting on a proven popularity among clinicians, they have some weak points such as long administration time, the lack of parallel forms and the poor generalization to real-life scenarios. An alternative to traditional paper-and-pencil tests is represented by ecological tests, so called for their intrinsic resemblance to daily-life experiences, which often require participants to interact with physical objects. An example is the Baking Tray Task (BTT), a task to assess the presence of USN, in which participants are asked to test their “cooking skills”, placing 16 objects on a surface "as if they were buns/cookies to put on a baking tray ". In line with what has been just described, the current work has led to the creation of E-TOKEN, a platform that allows the administration of tasks (BTT included) designed to investigate the visuospatial cognition of people, through the use of tangible interfaces (concrete objects to manipulate) and an augmented reality system. The BTT has been reproposed through E-TOKEN, which, thanks to its technology, is able to capture aspects of the performance of the participants (such as the spatial coordinates of the objects arranged on the surface and their positioning sequence) previously undetectable. These characteristics allow to acquire new types of data useful to develop statistical measures and indexes capable of making the diagnosis more informative and to grasp clinically interesting aspects. Through E-TOKEN, the data of 115 healthy participants and 9 patients with right hemispherical lesion were collected and used to create new statistics to enrich the diagnostic interpretation of the performance. Some future developments of the prototype concern the possibility of recreating new types of tasks for the assessment, training and rehabilitation of spatial cognition skills (and other cognitive functions) of individuals, extending the audience and integrating an automated data analysis module immediately available for clinicians.

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item