Intrinsic Resting-State Activity in Older Adults With Video Game Experience.

Hai-Yan Hou,Xi-Ze Jia,Ping Wang,Silin Huang,Jia-Xin Zhang,Hui-Jie Li

doi:10.3389/fnagi.2019.00119

Abstract

Playing video games is a prevalent leisure activity in current daily life, and studies have found that video game experience has positive effects in several cognitive domains. However, few studies have examined the effect of video game experience on the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF) among older adults. In the current study, we compared behavioral performance in the flanker task and ALFF activities of older adults, of whom 15 were video game players (VGPs) and 18 non-video game players (NVGPs). The results showed that VGPs outperformed NVGPs in the flanker task and that VGPs showed significantly increased ALFF relative to NVGPs in the left inferior occipital gyrus, left cerebellum and left lingual gyrus. Furthermore, the ALFF in the left inferior occipital gyrus and left lingual gyrus was positively correlated with cognitive performance as measured by Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores. These results revealed that playing video games might improve behavioral performance and change intrinsic brain activity in older adults. Future video game training studies in older adults are warranted to provide more evidence of the positive effects of video game experience on behavioral and brain function.

Highlights

With age, older adults may experience declining memory, reasoning, and speed of processing as well as peripheral vision and dynamic visual acuity (Park et al, 2002; Salthouse, 2004; Muiños and Ballesteros, 2014, 2015)
We mainly aimed to investigate the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF) differences between older video game players (VGPs) and older non-video game players (NVGPs) in combination with behavioral performance and sought to determine whether the differences in ALFF were associated with video game experience
The results showed that VGPs showed increased ALFF in the left inferior occipital gyrus, left cerebellum, and left lingual gyrus compared with NVGPs (Figure 1, Table 2)

Summary

Introduction

Older adults may experience declining memory, reasoning, and speed of processing as well as peripheral vision and dynamic visual acuity (Park et al, 2002; Salthouse, 2004; Muiños and Ballesteros, 2014, 2015). Increasing age is associated with a higher incidence of neurodegenerative disorders such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and Parkinson’s disease (PD; Blennow et al, 2006; Levy, 2007; Herrup, 2010; Luck et al, 2010) These changes affect the quality of daily life of older adults and aggravate the socioeconomic burden (Williams, 2005; Mitchell et al, 2010). Several beneficial interventions have been considered to delay cognitive decline in older adults, including memory strategy training (Li et al, 2016), dancing (Coubard et al, 2011), aerobic exercise (Erickson and Kramer, 2009), music training (WhiteSchwoch et al, 2013) and video game playing (Toril et al, 2014; Wang et al, 2016) Of these approaches, video games have received growing attention from researchers because of their popularity and encouraging transfer effects (Zelinski and Reyes, 2009; Oei and Patterson, 2013). Increasing evidence shows that video games are beneficial to the cognitive-perceptual domain, including reaction time (Qiu et al, 2018), visual short-term memory, processing speed and attention tasks (Ballesteros et al, 2014; McDermott et al, 2014) as well as higher-level cognitive functions such as executive function, reasoning and planning (Basak et al, 2008; Oei and Patterson, 2014; Buitenweg et al, 2017; Wang et al, 2017a)

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Conclusion