Driving video game reverses age-related mental decline

Car racing video games usually appeal to youngsters more than their grandparents. That could change if the results of a new study prove to be persuasive. A team led by Adam Gazzaley report that older adults aged 60 to 85 who played a customised driving video game called "NeuroRacer" didn't just get better at the game with sustained practice, they also improved on other mental tasks tapping memory and attention that decline with age. What's more, the researchers found these cognitive benefits correlated with changes to the electrical activity of the brain, as recorded by EEG. On the surface, these results appear to represent the "holy grail" of brain training whereby practice on one kind of mental task leads to benefits that generalise to other aspects of mental performance (hopefully with real-life beneficial consequences). The study breaks the recent trend for negative headlines prompted by research and meta-analyses that suggested brain training (especially working memory training) benefits consistently fail to transfer. In April the New Yorker put it starkly - "brain games are bogus". The multi-task version of NeuroRacer involves two elements: using a control pad to keep a car in the centre of a winding road, while simultaneously responding to the intermittent appearance of shapes on the screen. Players have to press a button as quickly as possible if a green circle appears, but withhold responding to any other shapes. An initial experiment with 174 p...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs