Neuroplasticity -Transference
Neuroplasticity is the brains ability to change and adapt in response to physiological or environmental changes. There are 10 principles of neuroplasticity, we were assigned the principle of transference. Transference is when one learned behaviour has an enhanced affect on the acquisition of a similar behaviour. For this assignment our goal was to design a small case test to research motor habilitation and whether transference can be observed.
The Method
In this scenario I played the role as a clinician, initially I completed a baseline assessment with my client for both texting and typing with her left hand. The client had to text “The quick brown fox jumped over …show more content…
Firstly, I believe that the similar behaviours that were selected for this task were to different for transference to take place. I noticed this when my client only used her fingers to type but when texting with her left hand she only used her thumb. The use of different fingers to complete the texting and typing might have made it too hard for the texting to transfer to the typing. A better behaviour to try could have been practising typing on an iPad with their left hand to see if it would transfer to typing on a laptop, or playing the piano with their left hand and observing if it transferred to typing left …show more content…
If the client was not putting in the practice at home and relied just on the direct therapy, the two weeks may not have been enough. In an article called Swallowing and Dysphagia Rehabilitation: Translating Principles of Neuroplasticity into Clinically Orientated Evidence (Robbins et al, 2008) it discusses how for a successful transference to occur both skill training and transcranial magnetic stimulation are to be used in conjunction. We did not have access to use TMS and therefore this may have impacted the task acquisition. Although we may have been using one of the principles of neuroplasticity, we did not however think about the first principle, ‘Use it or Lose it, ' this occurs when a person fails to complete a task over a duration of time, therefore leading to the functional decline of that task. In this case the client was not practising typing to the same intensity as texting and if the texting did not transfer, it would be expected that the typing would not improve and even slightly decline as it did. During the study, texting with the left hand did improve significantly over the course of the two weeks. This supports the ‘Use it and improve it’ principle which suggests that training a specific task can lead to improved function when completing that