Date of Submission

Spring 2019

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Psychology

Project Advisor 1

Thomas Hutcheon

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Studies have shown that cognitive training improves brain function. There are many forms of training that have been used to improve brain function from recalling a list to improve memory, using aerobic exercise to increase brain activation, to increasing the ability to talk in nonverbal autistic children. Training the brain and focusing on one task can also improve untargeted areas of the brain. This study uses the understanding of how perceiving biological movement of hands and how working with one’s hands can activate the superior temporal sulcus to create a brain training task that will activate and improve participants visuospatial perception. Participants completed a 6-day training task of either replicating their hands in clay or completing crossword puzzles. By completing a mental rotation task, the improvement or no improvement after the brain training was recorded. There was no significant difference found in improvement of reaction time in the control or experimental group. Regarding improvement of accuracy, the experimental group had a larger improvement in scores, but there was no significance found in the improvement scores and groups. There was a positive correlation between improvement of accuracy scores and improvement of clay hands. The correlation between improvement of clay hands and accuracy scores and the interaction between improvement of accuracy scores and group were approaching significance. Together these results suggest that in future studies the training should be longer and more intensive with a larger participant size to see a significant improvement in mental rotation scores, resulting in improvement of visuospatial perception.

Open Access Agreement

Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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