METHODS:
New Yorkers clinically diagnose with Alzheimer’s disease is the population of interest in this study. The participants sampled from this population included middle age men and women. The age range of these participants is 60 to 70 years old, with an average age of 65. African American, Hispanics and Caucasian individuals with a minimum high school education were included in this study. Individuals with any other types of dementia or any other neurological brain disorder were excluded from this study. Participants for this study were recruited using advertisements. Ads for this study were placed in nursing homes, retirement homes, hospitals and counseling centers. Participants were offered compensation for their involvement in this study. Individuals who responded to the Ads and met the specific criteria were asked to complete two measures of visuospatial abilities, the paper folding and card rotation test. Based on the results individuals with the same score were randomly assigned into two groups. Group one participants were given a board specifically design to improve spatial skills. Group two participants were given another board game not specifically design to improve spatial skills.
For this study a game focused on visuospatial skills were created. The game created focused on an individual’s ability to identify rotated representation of three dimensional objects. The materials included in this game are playing cards, chips, and image cards. The image cards consist of pictures of three dimensional non rotated objects. The playing cards each consist of five column and four rows, totaling 20 images. The images presented on the playing cards are rotated representation of the ones displayed in the image cards. Individuals who identified five rotated images vertically, horizontally, or diagonally wins the game. In this experiment the image cards were selected by investigators. To ensure that the selected image card can be seen by everyone it would be displayed on a projector. The playing cards and chips were also distributed to the participants by the investigators.
The spatial training group and the non-spatial training group are the two conditions created in this experiment. The instructions for each group were verbally presented to its participants at the beginning of the experiment. The participants in the spatial training condition were given the created spatial training game to play. Participants in the non-spatial training condition were given Bingo to play. Both games were administered by investigators and played in private and separate rooms. The games were played three times with15 minute intervals after each completion. After playing each game participants were ask to complete the same two measures of visuospatial ability given to them at the beginning of the experiment. The results from the paper folding and card rotation test would be manually collected and analyze.