Cognitive remediation is a neurobehavioral treatment that uses repetitive practice and compensatory and adaptive strategies to facilitate improvement in targeted cognitive areas, such as memory, attention, and problem solving (Medalia and Choi 2009). Cognitive remediation, also called “cognitive retraining” or “cognitive rehabilitation,” has been applied to several neurological and psychiatric conditions (for a review, see Langenbahn et al. 2013), including alcoholism (Allen et al. 1997; Godfrey and Knight 1985; McCrady and Smith 1986). Electrophysiological measures can serve as metrics of cognitive functioning during pre- and posttreatment of cognitive remediation. For example, Horowitz-Kraus and Breznitz (2009) found that brain activity changed in dyslexic patients as a result of working-memory training, as evidenced by an increase in both working-memory capacity and the amplitude of the ERN component of the ERPs. When ERN amplitudes increased, the percentage of errors on the Sternberg test of working memory decreased, suggesting that by expanding the working-memory capacity, larger units of information are retained in the system, enabling more effective error detection.
