Role of Lateralized Cognitive and Motor Deficits on Functional Independence Post Stroke

In this presentation, we will discuss how motor and cognitive impairments in the ipsilesional arm of chronic stroke survivors with severe hemiparesis differ with the side of brain damage. This is a group of individuals that are largely ignored in rehabilitation research and would benefit from new advances because they depend exclusively on their ipsilesional arm to conduct their daily activities. We know from previous research that the ipsilesional arm also has motor deficits, and we now take it further by studying the lateralized cognitive processes that affect movement. We recruited 21 chronic stroke survivors from a volunteer sample to complete a simple reaching task and a cognitively challenging reaching task on the Kinereach virtual reality motion tracking system. We assessed each participant's kinematics data during these tasks to derive outcome measures relating to cognitive deficits and motor deficits. We will discuss the results of these experiments and their implications for future studies and clinical rehabilitation.