Abstract
A major goal of recent research in aging has been to examine cognitive plasticity in older adults and its capacity to counteract cognitive decline. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether older adults could benefit from brain training with video games in a cross-modal oddball task designed to assess distraction and alertness. Twenty-seven healthy older adults participated in the study (15 in the experimental group, 12 in the control group. The experimental group received 20 1-hr video game training sessions using a commercially available brain-training package (Lumosity) involving problem solving, mental calculation, working memory and attention tasks. The control group did not practice this package and, instead, attended meetings with the other members of the study several times along the course of the study. Both groups were evaluated before and after the intervention using a cross-modal oddball task measuring alertness and distraction. The results showed a significant reduction of distraction and an increase of alertness in the experimental group and no variation in the control group. These results suggest neurocognitive plasticity in the old human brain as training enhanced cognitive performance on attentional functions.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT02007616
Highlights
Increasing evidence suggests that playing action video games enhances various aspects of cognition in young adults, including peripheral vision, visual attention, and spatial skills [1,2,3,4,5]
We analyzed performance in the oddball task to examine whether the video game training impacted on alertness and distraction
We used a cross-modal oddball paradigm to investigate whether cognitive training with non-action video games would improve older adults’ performance in two basic attentional functions: (1) filtering out task-irrelevant information to maintaining the focus of attention on task-relevant information; and (2) alertness
Summary
Increasing evidence suggests that playing action video games enhances various aspects of cognition in young adults, including peripheral vision, visual attention, and spatial skills [1,2,3,4,5]. Most action video games are speeded, intense, violent, and may not be suitable for older adults, . A recent study conducted with young adults showed that cognitive improvement is not limited to action games [6] and real time strategy-based video game training has been found to enhance executive control abilities in older adults [7]. It remains unknown, whether practicing non-action video games can be effective in enhancing other fundamental cognitive functions in older adults, such as for example attentional functions (which typically deteriorate in old age). Some cognitive functions, including world knowledge, verbal abilities [8,9,10] and implicit memory [11,12,13,14,15,16,17] are preserved in older adults, normal aging is associated with a significant decline in certain cognitive functions such as attention, episodic memory, working memory, processing speed, and executive functions [18,19,20,21]
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