EEG Changes in Traumatic Brain Injured Patients After Cognitive Rehabilitation

ABSTRACT. Background. Little research has addressed cognitive re-habilitation and changes in the electroencephalogram (EEG) following training of traumatic brain injured (TBI) patients suffering from atten-tion deficits because of their injury. This study focuses on changes in rel-ative and absolute power in frontal, central and posterior regions of the TBI patients ’ brain following training on attention skills using a soft-ware program called Captain’s Log. Methods. The five participants–aged 20 to 45 years–received 22 ses-sions of training on their attention skills. Their attention skills were assessed at the beginning and end of the research study through a variety of psychometrics as well as through scaled self-reports. Their EEG was also recorded before and after training, during eyes-open resting base-line, eyes-closed resting baseline, eight cognitive tasks and a post-tasks eyes-open resting condition. Only the first two baselines were analyzed in the present study. (The rest of the conditions will be analyzed in an-other study.) The hypotheses that the participants ’ delta, theta, and alpha relative and absolute power would decrease and that their beta power would increase following training were analyzed. Results. Although there were significant post-task changes in four out of the five case studies in relative and absolute power, both in eyes-closed Please note that this electronic prepublication galley may contain typographical errors and may be missing artwork, such as charts, photographs, etc. Pagination in this version will differ from the published version. Stamatina Stathopoulou received Masters and PhD degrees in Experimental Psy