Nancy Chiaravalloti, PhD: Strategy Training in Cognitive Rehabilitation

“There is a very robust literature on strategy training in healthy populations. There are hundreds of studies showing that various types of strategy trainings really do help people learn new information. We’ve taken that and we’ve applied those techniques to people who have neurological injuries…or neurological illness.”

At Kessler Foundation, there has been a widespread effort to develop cognitive rehabilitation treatment protocols that incorporate strategy training—the applications of tactics to aid in the understanding and recollection of new information. Their goal is to use these techniques to improve patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and multiple sclerosis (MS), among other neurologic disorders and injuries.

Nancy Chiaravalloti, PhD, director, Centers for Neuropsychology and Neuroscience Research, and Traumatic Brain Injury Research, Kessler Foundation, has been at the forefront of this effort. In a conversation with NeurologyLive, Chiaravalloti discussed what prompted these efforts at Kessler Foundation as well as how they’ve been utilized thus far.

Additionally, she shared insight into how she and her colleagues at Kessler developed these programs and what steps they took to take these strategies from the literature into practice.