Using video-games in a small group setting is feasible, safe and satisfying. Video-games improve indicators of physical activity of individuals with chronic stroke.
Video games elicited more UE purposeful repetitions and higher acceleration of movement compared with traditional therapy in individuals with chronic stroke.
Playing video games was perceived not as treatment but as a motivating tool to facilitate whole-body movement. Therefore, this intervention might be suitable to be used in the community for ongoing intervention.
Background: Recent research suggests stress may affect cognitive performance including memory, executive functioning, decision-making, and task-switching. However, it is unknown whether these effects are aversive or advantageous for effort exertion. This experiment aimed to evaluate the effects of acute psychosocial stress on willingness to exert cognitive control processes in a cognitive-effort-based decision-making task.Methods: To test this, 40 participants (20 female) in a within-subject, fully crossed, randomized design, were exposed to both a psychosocial stress induction condition (the Trier Social Stress Test; TSST) and a control condition. Subsequently, they underwent the Demand Selection Task (DST) that tests for participants’ effort aversion by manipulating switch probabilities in a task-switching paradigm. Results and Conclusion: The induction of stress did not lead to significant error or accuracy rates, or significant differences in cognitive effort avoidance. Previous research indicated sex differences in response to stress. However, there is a lack of data on sex differences in the avoidance of demanding cognitive processes. Therefore, we assessed sex differences in the DST and found that women were more likely to avoid cognitive effort, choosing the less cognitively demanding cue more often than men. Limitations: A limitation of this study is the small sample size. Future research should increase the sample size and take individual differences in stress responders, type of stressor, and biases on effort exertion into account.
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