rEAP is associated with changes in cognitive function and neuroimaging
hearing, working memory, MCI
After rEAP treatment, the increased ReHo values in the right ACC and left dl-SFG in patients with MCI were related to improving overall cognitive function and verbal ability. The frontal lobe plays a vital role in cognitive functions such as memory and executive functions. The superior frontal gyrus (SFG) is anatomically connected to the middle frontal gyrus through arcuate fibers in the dorsolateral area. The SFG also has positive functional connections with the lateral prefrontal lobe and the posterior cingulate/precuneus. These findings indicate that the dorsolateral SFG may be one of the nodes of the executive cognitive network involved in initiating and regulating cognitive control [The rEAP group accepted the use of art media to complete different art training themes. The participants need comprehensive information such as through vision, hearing, working memory and short-term memory retention, media operation skills, goal-oriented planning steps, and idea visualization. They also need continuous self-monitoring and iteration between different ideas to meet art themes. These processes stimulate executive control networks involved in creativity, planning, decision-making, and cognitive control [Although the benefits of rEAP did not survive FDR correction, we observed the potential of rEAP to improve memory and attention in the older adults with MCI. We did not expect that rEAP would affect memory function, and we speculate that the main reason for this phenomenon is the heterogeneity of MCI. The older patients with MCI included in this study were patients with mixed MCI. In contrast, the patients with naMCI in the rEAP group were widely distributed, which may have caused the difference in memory performance between the two groups at baseline. Although we adjusted for the effect of baseline memory performance, the heterogeneity of MCI may be responsible for the fact that the rEAP group was more likely to obtain memory benefits than the HE group. For the attention benefit, we think it is associated with how the rEAP is delivered. The rEAP requires participants to listen carefully to the guide and try and practice art creation repeatedly. In this process, participants need to be immersed in the flow associated with increased attention and continuous participation. Participants often need to integrate a wide range of information, including information detection, identification, discrimination, and attention switching between multi-tasking, to promote the visualization of artistic creation, and such training will naturally translate into the benefits in attention tests [Given that most of the patients in this study were patients with naMCI, naMCI can be impaired in any non-memory cognitive domain, which creates heterogeneity in the naMCI subpopulation. However, memory and attention performance are closely related to executive function in patients with naMCI, often assisted by distributed neural networks [