Efficacy of Cognitive-Non Motor Rehabilitation on Working Memory and Cognitive Flexibility of the Children with Disability in Reading Learning

The present study was conducted to investigate the efficacy of cognitive- non motor rehabilitation on the working memory and cognitive flexibility of the children with disability in reading learning. It was a quasi-experimental study with pretest, posttest and control group design. Follow-up period was administered during two months. The statistical population of the study included second- to fourth-grade children with reading learning disability in zone 6 of Tehran in academic year 2021-22. Thirty seven children with learning reading disability were selected through purposive sampling method and randomly accommodated into experimental and control groups. The experimental group received twelve cognitive- non motor rehabilitation sessions during six weeks. The applied instruments in this study included N-BACK software (Jaeggi, et.al. 2008), Tower of London Procedure (Shallice, 1982). The collected data were analyzed via SPSS23 software through mixed ANOVA and follow-up tests. The results showed that cognitive- non motor rehabilitation has significant effect on working memory (p<0001) and cognitive flexibility (p<0001) of the children with reading learning disability. According to the results of the present study it can be concluded that cognitive- non motor rehabilitation can be used an effective method to improve working memory and cognitive flexibility of the children with reading learning disability through influencing cortex and applying purposeful cognitive-motor exercises.