Background: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has brought about advances in the fields of brain plasticity and lifespan brain change, that might be of special interest for cognitive rehabilitation research and, eventually, in clinical practice. Parallel, intensive cognitive training studies show promising results for the prospect of retraining some of the impaired functioning following acquired brain injury.
Objectives: However, cognitive training research is largely performed without concurrent assessments of brain structural change and reorganization, which could have addressed possible mechanisms of training-related neuroplasticity.
Methods: Criticism of cognitive training studies is often focused on lack of ecologically valid, daily-living assessments of treatment effect, and on whether the applied cognitive measures overlap too much with the training exercises. Yet, the present paper takes another point of view, where the relevance of recent MRI research of brain plasticity to the field of cognitive rehabilitation is examined.
Results: Arguably, treatment ought to be measured at the same level of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health model, as it is targeting. In the case of cognitive training that will be the "body structure" and "body function" levels.
Conclusions: MRI has shown promise to detect macro- and microstructural activity-related changes in the brain following intensive training.
Keywords: Cognitive training; brain morphometry; brain plasticity; cognitive rehabilitation; diffusion tensor imaging; magnetic resonance imaging.