Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Accident, infection, surgery, or stroke resulting in brain trauma can leave individuals with significant and pervasive cognitive disabilities. The need to increase fiinctional recovery for these individuals challenges the combined knowledge, skills, and vision across disciplines including neuropsychology, rehabilitation psychology, occupational therapy, speech pathology, and computer science. This paper reports such interdisciplinary research to develop an approach to computer-assisted retraining that can support and encourage patients' own efforts to take charge of their lives again and rebuild their cognitive skills and thereby enhance their vocational and social opportunities. The Adaptable Learning Environment for Rehabilitation Training (ALERT) will track user performance levels, interest, preferences, and progress within an environment that uses Virtual Reality for life-skill simulations and activities to functionally model cognitive task domains. A single standardized assessment method is being designed to collect information about cognitive variables in the context of mediating and support variables. The functional developmental model of recovery upon which ALERT is based will use the ongoing assessment as it updates the patient user model within the intelligent tutoring system to guide the suggestions for treatment at each successive stage.