Can we get a summary?
They took a group of people with schizophrenia, and in one group they did targeted cognitive training, in the other, targeted cognitive training plus social cognitive training.
Both groups had 70 hours of training. After 6 months they tested both groups for cognition, social cognition, reward processing, symptoms and functioning and found significant gains for both groups. The group that got both kinds of training had improvement in more areas than the ones that had the single kind of training.
They also found that gains in cognition often meant gains in functional capacity, and gains in reward processing led to gains in social functioning. That’s important because they’re not just “teaching to the test” they are actually teaching something that helped people out in their daily lives, and that the improvements were still there 6 months after training.
From the full paper:
SocialVille, the social cognitive intervention used here, is grounded in the principles of neuroplasticity and designed to improve the fidelity of representations of socially relevant stimuli while simultaneously targeting processing speed, working memory, and attentional control
Here’s an example of the changes in global cognition over time:
At baseline: 29.41
After 40 hours training: 31.57
after 70 hours training: 32.91
6 months after training ended: 36.06
PANSS also decreased modestly, about 4 points.