60th percentile for Speed!

A-One finally got to his Friday game before he went to bed Saturday morning - when? Don't know.  He's had the same pair of pyjama pants on night and day for the last week.

The exciting news is that he's hit 60th percentile for Speed, and is almost cracking 50th percentile for Memory. He was served an information processing game, but no working memory.  Nevertheless, he gained another PB for the cafe game for remembering names, faces and orders. I suggested to him that once he's hit 50th percentile for Memory, he might adjust his training priorities so that he gets more intensive work on Attention and Flexibility.  He didn't protest, so we'll see once he hits the mark.

Also, through SharpBrains again, I saw a reference to a paper published in Nature, by two professors advocating for games developers and neuroscientists to collaborate to produce digital games that train the brain.  Yeh! When you think that children's game play is how they learn and grow, why not digital games too?  One of the scientists spoke at a TED talk last November.

ESCoNS Cognitive Neurotherapeutics - a new field of gaming

A-One seems to have reached a plateau in his Lumosity brain training over the last couple of days, sitting at overall percentile of  31.9.  His games have included information processing and working memory on most of the last three days with several PBs on Wednesday.  However, yesterday (Thursday) he achieved a PB for Penguin Pursuit! This is the speed game where he complains that the penguin is cheating because it goes faster than he can. Nevertheless he completed level 15 of the game, and commented that he hasn't cracked level 16 yet.

Through SharpBrains I was alerted to an exciting symposium happening at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles this month. It's the second annual conference and meeting of The Entertainment Software and Cognitive Neurotherapeutics Society.  The press release states that it fosters collaboration to advance development of video game therapy to diagnose and combat mental disorders and improve cognitive learning, brain capacity and function. 

The society seems to have developed the whole new and exciting field of “cognitive neurotherapeutics.” What got me really excited was that the founder of the society is a past Executive of Activision Blizzard which publishes World of Warcraft!  So that means that there are others who recognise the potential of combining the disciplines of good game design with neuroscientific brain training!  It makes me feel hopeful about the increasing availability of online brain training exercises.  We just need to ensure that it's clear how to assess which games address which cognitive dysfunctions.

An online service and other links

Last night I was following up some of the organisations represented at Friday's workshop at UQ.  A partner of Synapse is The Developing Foundation based on Brisbane. It provides a link to neuro-developmental therapy programs which include online consultations and assessments.  The site refers to brain neuroplasticity and lists experience with developmental delay, global developmental delay, and PPD-NOS.  There appears to be a great deal of alignment between the online therapy programs and my objectives - do they also incorporate online brain training?

An Australian researcher into Autism, from Macquarie University in Sydney, blogs at Cracking the Enigma.  Macquarie also hosts the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (which doesn't list UQ as a collaborating or partner organisation.)  More leads to follow up.