Culturally Appropriate Stimuli for Cognitive Neuropsychology-Based Treatment “Intensive Language Action Therapy (ILAT)”

CONTEXT: A standardized set of picture stimuli for neuro-language disorder has been long overdue. AIMS: To develop a standardized set of 303 pictures for use in experiments of Intensive Language Action Therapy (ILAT). METHODS AND MATERIAL: Several sources with standardized picture stimuli having culturally unbiased features were studied. Among those studies two prime sources (1) Snodgrass & Vanderwart (1980), 127 (89+37) items and (2) Neininger & Pulvermuller (2002), 147 (89+56) items were used extensively. Out of 303 stimuli, 89 items were common to both principle sources. An Indian study by George & Mathuranath (2007) has also been taken as an additional source. Line drawing stimuli were standardized on four variables of central relevance to memory and cognitive processing: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS USED: All measures related to 303 concepts i.e. % correct, H statistics, familiarity, image agreement and visual complexity were analysed descriptively. RESULTS: Low mean and positive skew on H statistics and visual complexity show that many concepts had a high name agreement (13 concepts have H values of .0, and 55 have H values of 0.68 or below, where 0.68 represents consensus among all but few of the subjects on a picture's name) and were visually simple line drawings. The intercorrelations among the four measures were low, suggesting that they are indices of different attributes of the pictures. CONCLUSIONS: Usage of appropriate items/stimuli has immense potential to influence aphasia therapy outcome. This set of pictures and its normative variable has enhanced the ILAT outcome. It could be generalised for other aphasia therapy too to understand its efficacy.