ABSTRACT

Objective : The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the mental practice on the treatment of unilateral neglect in a person with stroke.Methods : A single subject experimental research with ABA design was employed in this study. The experiment composed of 14 sessions in total: 5 sessions for baseline, 6 sessions for mental practice treatment, and 3 sessions for the second baseline. Each session for intervention took 5 minutes daily. The unilateral neglect was measured by Line Bisection Test, Albert Test, and Reading and Writing Tests made by the experimenters.Results : On the Line Bisection Test, the mean length of the error distance improved from 53.8mm in the baseline to 37.7mm in the intervention, and 34.3mm post intervention; On the Albert Test, the mean number of errors on the left decreased from 19.2 in the baseline to 10.3 in the intervention, and to 3.0 post intervention, and on the right side, decreased from 5.6 in the baseline to 0.3 in the intervention, and to zero post intervention. On the Reading Test, the subject read no word out of 38 words on the left side both in the baseline and in the intervention, and showed improvement on reading the words on the right side from the mean of 19.6 words in the baseline to 29.8 in the intervention, and 33.3 words post intervention. On the Writing Test, the subject showed a moderate improvement: On the left side, zero number out of 40 words in the baseline, the mean of 2.67 in the intervention, and 4.0 post intervention, and on the right side, the mean of 8.2 words in the baseline, 18.0 in the intervention, and 19.7 post intervention.Conclusion : A five minutes of mental practice intervention per session for 6 sessions was shown effective in reducing unilateral neglect symptom on the tests regarding crossing the midline and selecting lines but its effect was negligible on the functional tasks such as reading or writing words presented on the affected side.