How Does
Skylar’s Run Work?
Skylar’s Run uses the proprietary Focus>Forward Modeling Intervention (FFM) to directly measure, target, and treat the cognitive skills that are impaired in children with ADHD. The treatment deploys a therapeutic curriculum of 13 cognitive skills that is personalized to the needs of the child being treated. It is the development of these cognitive skills that, when applied to everyday life, can lead to clinically significant improvements in ADHD.
Focus>Forward Modeling Intervention (FFM)
Built on peer-reviewed neuroscience research, FFM is designed to deliver sensory stimuli to cognitive neural systems that naturally generate physiological changes in children’s brains. It does this by:
Making the state of attention visible to the child, so they learn how to effectively manage their attention
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Automatically adjusting the treatment based the ‘instant level’ of a child’s attention
Validating transfer of the cognitive skills to the real world (school, home & life)
When played over 8 hours, in 20-minute treatment episodes, over an 8-week treatment plan (~24 treatment), the embedded personalized cognitive skills curriculum empowers a children’s control of attention, inhibition and self-regulation.
Therapeutic Curriculum of 13 cognitive skills
At the core of Skylar’s Run is a curriculum of 13 cognitive skills personalized to each child. These skills are embedded within each mission across the adventure series. Each of these skills is a necessary component of attention, inhibition, and self-regulatory control. By repeatedly challenging the development of each one of these skills, the child develops the ability to govern their control of attention, inhibition and self-regulation.
Skylar’s Run systematically treats these skills in a dynamic curriculum focused on developing different cognitive skills in each mission of the adventure series. It is over the course of the curriculum, spanning approximately the 8-week of treatments (15 missions or approximately 24 treatments), that each child further develops the underlying 13 skills of attention, inhibition, and self-regulation control.
What are Cognitive Skills?
Cognitive skills or function is a broad term that refers to mental processes involved in the acquisition of knowledge, manipulation of information, reasoning and the ability to plan and achieve goals. Cognitive functions include the domains of perception, memory, learning, attention, decision making, and language abilities.1
1. Kiely, Kim (2014). “Cognitive function”. In Michalos, Kim M. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer. pp. 974–978.
We have learned so much about how a child can learn, transfer and retain executive function skills while playing an action-adventure video game. Most importantly we have learned how to activate rapid skills learning, seen the attention circuitry actually change positively and correlated these architectural changes with significant behavior improvements.
Dr. Thor Bergersen M.D.
Child Psychiatrist ADHD Boston
- www.ADHDBoston.com
Dr. Bergersen received research support from ATENTIV Health.
