taVNS + CCT for Neurocognitive Rehab

Percent of participants who completed all study procedures(i.e., V1 pre-treatment assessments, all 10 treatment sessions, and V2 post-treatment assessments). This will be calculated as a binary count (1=yes, 0=no) of completers divided by the total number of participants.

Percent of treatment sessions completed. This will be calculated as the number of full treatment sessions completed by each participant divided by the prescribed number of sessions.

Ratings of treatment acceptability on the Theoretical Framework of Acceptability (TFA) Questionnaire. The TFA is a self-report measure on which participants rate their perceptions of treatment acceptability via 5-point Likert-scale ratings on 8 items regarding the following: affective attitude, burden, perceived effectiveness, intervention coherence, self-efficacy, opportunity costs, ethicality, and general acceptability. Item scores will be averaged (ranging from 0-5), with higher scores indicating greater intervention acceptability.

The NIHTB-CB is a performance-based, iPad-administered ~30-minute suite of 7 tests that ascertain abilities in different cognitive domains (e.g. executive function, episodic memory, working memory, processing speed, language). It was developed using advanced psychometric techniques to minimize measurement error and produces normed subtest and composite scores. The outcome will be the fully-corrected T-score (range T=0-100; Mean T=50, SD=10; higher scores indicate better cognition) of the Fluid Cognition Composite (normed for age and years of education).

These are self-report questionnaires to which respondents rate their perceived (i.e., subjective) cognitive abilities and symptoms (i.e., depression, anxiety, fatigue) on a 5-point scale (from 1-"Not at all"; "Never" to 5-"Very much"; "Always", respectively) during the specified timeframe. It is a computer adaptive test given as a REDCap survey that yields normed T-scores (range T=0-100; Mean T=50, SD=10). Higher scores indicate more of the respective symptom.

Functional brain MRI scans will be collected while participants are at rest (i.e. rs-fMRI) during the pre-treatment and post-treatment MRI sessions. The rs-fMRI data will be used to compute functional connectivity, which is the correlation between the activity in each brain region pair over the course of the scan. Each brain region belongs to 1 of 7 functional networks (frontoparietal: FPN; default mode: DMN; dorsal attention: DAT; ventral attention: VAT; limbic: LIM; visual: VIS; somatomotor: MOT). Connectivity will be calculated as the Fisher's r-to-z transformed Pearson correlations between the BOLD time courses of each region pair within each network.