Validation of Hit and Avoid Task as an Aphasia Assessment Tool
School Name
Spring Valley High School
Grade Level
11th Grade
Presentation Topic
Psychology
Presentation Type
Non-Mentored
Abstract
Aphasia is a mental disorder that impairs a patient’s ability to perform speech-based activities, which includes ‘phonological’ and ‘semantic’ aspects of said activities. While many techniques are currently being researched, used, or suggested for assessing a patient’s phonological and semantic processing skills, little research is done on the capabilities of the Hit and Avoid Task (HAAT), a task that involves patients hitting and avoiding words that fall from the top of the screen with a cursor. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the worth of the Hit and Avoid Task as a method for assessing the phonological and semantic processing skills of post-stroke patients with aphasia. It was hypothesized that while Hit and Avoid would not be as effective as the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB), it still would perform reasonably well while taking less time. The Hit and Avoid Task results and the lesion maps of subjects from the Center for Study of Aphasia Recovery (C-STAR) databases were imported into NiiStat, which was able to correlate phonological, semantic, and spatial processing to various lesion regions. With voxel-wise lesion-symptom mapping, only semantic processing led to voxels surviving the correlation threshold; however, it is still considered insignificant considering how few voxels survived. With atlas-based lesion-symptom mapping for both semantic and phonological regions of interest, multiple relevant regions survived the threshold but were not able to differentiate between semantic and phonological behavior.
Recommended Citation
Nelakuditi, Satvik, "Validation of Hit and Avoid Task as an Aphasia Assessment Tool" (2023). South Carolina Junior Academy of Science. 125.
https://scholarexchange.furman.edu/scjas/2023/all/125
Location
ECL 119
Start Date
3-25-2023 9:45 AM
Presentation Format
Oral and Written
Group Project
No
Validation of Hit and Avoid Task as an Aphasia Assessment Tool
ECL 119
Aphasia is a mental disorder that impairs a patient’s ability to perform speech-based activities, which includes ‘phonological’ and ‘semantic’ aspects of said activities. While many techniques are currently being researched, used, or suggested for assessing a patient’s phonological and semantic processing skills, little research is done on the capabilities of the Hit and Avoid Task (HAAT), a task that involves patients hitting and avoiding words that fall from the top of the screen with a cursor. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the worth of the Hit and Avoid Task as a method for assessing the phonological and semantic processing skills of post-stroke patients with aphasia. It was hypothesized that while Hit and Avoid would not be as effective as the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB), it still would perform reasonably well while taking less time. The Hit and Avoid Task results and the lesion maps of subjects from the Center for Study of Aphasia Recovery (C-STAR) databases were imported into NiiStat, which was able to correlate phonological, semantic, and spatial processing to various lesion regions. With voxel-wise lesion-symptom mapping, only semantic processing led to voxels surviving the correlation threshold; however, it is still considered insignificant considering how few voxels survived. With atlas-based lesion-symptom mapping for both semantic and phonological regions of interest, multiple relevant regions survived the threshold but were not able to differentiate between semantic and phonological behavior.
