Maintenance of voluntary self-regulation learned through neurofeedback

Continuing this post, from Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, 2017, 11:131.

"For clinical applications it is important to know if learned self-regulation can be maintained over longer periods of time and whether it transfers to situations without neurofeedback. Here, we present preliminary results from five healthy participants who successfully learned to control their visual cortex activity and who we re-scanned 6 and 14 months after the initial neurofeedback training to perform learned self-regulation. We found that participants achieved levels of self-regulation that were similar to those achieved at the end of the successful initial training, and this without further neurofeedback information. Our results demonstrate that learned self-regulation can be maintained over longer periods of time and causes lasting transfer effects."

"The main limitation of this study is the small sample size of only four participants in the first follow-up session and five participants in the second follow-up session. Thus, our results should be considered as a preliminary demonstration of lasting effects that require further verification in larger samples. The second limitation is that we did not include a control group without neurofeedback that attempts self-regulation based only on cognitive task instructions. Without such a control group, we cannot completely exclude the possibility that mere practice led to the improvement across sessions during the initial training and transfer runs, and that these practice effects could have then carried over to the follow-up study."