Neurodevelopmental disorders: Assessing and training working memory

Abstract

It is vital that working memory capacity can be assessed and trained with motivating resources, in a personalized way in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. This paper illustrates the possibility of a serious game, such as WorM, to assess and train children’s working memory capacity. WorM was designed, developed and evaluated through three studies (Study 1: informative, Study 2: validation and Study 3: user studies). The first two qualitative studies employ in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, to identify, argue and validate suitable design aspects guided by interviews from teachers and psychologists. The third study presents the usefulness of WorM based on the Item Response Theory analysis and answers from 23 end-user, typical children. Examples of important design aspects identified in Study 1 revealed the role of captivating interests, customization, short duration, rewards, feedback and clear instructions for designing tasks with right images and sound effects. From these, Study 2 enhanced the role of interactive visual feedback for correct and incorrect sorting, using images, keyboard keys, multiple colors, or the phase of the trial. Study 3 illustrates how Correct Pepper Classification tasks show some variability in difficulty, where the range of difficulties was higher in the game tasks than in the standardized Childhood Executive Functioning Inventory (CHEXI) task, usually applied for identifying the NDD characteristics in the examined users. While both instruments showed good reliability with high Person and Item Separation Reliability and Cronbach’s alpha values, the findings of this paper suggest that serious games can offer promising prospects to provide meaningful contexts to assess and train working memory by the WorM game.