Cognitive and neural plasticity in older adults' prospective memory following training with the Virtual Week computer game.

Nathan S Rose,Fergus I M Craik,Gavin M Bidelman,Alexandra Hering,Peter G Rendell,Matthias Kliegel

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2015.00592

Abstract

Prospective memory (PM) – the ability to remember and successfully execute our intentions and planned activities – is critical for functional independence and declines with age, yet few studies have attempted to train PM in older adults. We developed a PM training program using the Virtual Week computer game. Trained participants played the game in 12, 1-h sessions over 1 month. Measures of neuropsychological functions, lab-based PM, event-related potentials (ERPs) during performance on a lab-based PM task, instrumental activities of daily living, and real-world PM were assessed before and after training. Performance was compared to both no-contact and active (music training) control groups. PM on the Virtual Week game dramatically improved following training relative to controls, suggesting PM plasticity is preserved in older adults. Relative to control participants, training did not produce reliable transfer to laboratory-based tasks, but was associated with a reduction of an ERP component (sustained negativity over occipito-parietal cortex) associated with processing PM cues, indicative of more automatic PM retrieval. Most importantly, training produced far transfer to real-world outcomes including improvements in performance on real-world PM and activities of daily living. Real-world gains were not observed in either control group. Our findings demonstrate that short-term training with the Virtual Week game produces cognitive and neural plasticity that may result in real-world benefits to supporting functional independence in older adulthood.

Highlights

Prospective memory (PM) – the ability to remember and successfully execute our intentions and planned activities – is critical for successful, independent living in everyday life (Einstein and McDaniel, 1990; Ellis, 1996)
Prior to training, participants could only remember to perform approximately 3–4 tasks correctly on the pre-test session; the training gains represent more than a twofold increase in the capacity to perform PM tasks correctly
The decrease in the number of times that each day needed to be repeated over the course of training is in spite of the increase in the difficulty and number of tasks that were to be performed on each day over the course of the training program

Summary

Introduction

Prospective memory (PM) – the ability to remember and successfully execute our intentions and planned activities – is critical for successful, independent living in everyday life (Einstein and McDaniel, 1990; Ellis, 1996). As the world’s population ages, it is becoming increasingly important to develop ways to support successful PM functioning so that older adults can continue living independently, at home, without the need for assisted care. The present study attempted to train healthy older adults to perform everyday PM tasks using a computerized board game, called Virtual Week (Rendell and Craik, 2000). While previous attempts at using cognitive training to attain this goal have generally been unsuccessful (Reichman et al, 2010; Craik and Rose, 2012), the alternative method of “training for transfer” that we report here resulted in some encouraging results

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Conclusion