Scientists have developed a video game-based training strategy, which they say could "repair" cognitive decline in older individuals, according to a study published in the journalNature.
Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, have created NeuroRacer, a computer driving game that researchers say could be used to improve multi-tasking and cognitive-control abilities.
The 3D video game challenges cognitive control by providing a series of distractions on the screen that the players must try to avoid while driving. The better the players are at avoiding the distractions, the more challenging the game becomes.
The research team tested the game on 174 adults between 20 and 79 years of age. All participants were required to play the game for 1 hour, three times a week for a period of 1 month, and EEG scans were used to measure the participants' brain activity.
They were required to play the game in two distinct conditions. The first was a "sign only" task, where the participants were asked to respond as quickly as possible to a particular sign, only when a green circle appeared on the screen.
The second game condition was "sign and drive." This required participants to simultaneously perform the sign task while driving a car and maintaining its position in the center of a winding road using a joystick.
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Using a cost index, the researchers assessed the performance of multi-tasking within the participants by calculating the percentage change in "discriminability" between the "sign only" and "sign and drive" tasks. The more negative a percentage cost, the more distraction occurred when a participant engaged within both tasks.
"The game is adaptive, so when the participants get better, the game gets more challenging and keeps pushing them," explains Adam Gazzaley, study author and associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry at the Neuroscience Imaging Center of the University of California, San Francisco.
"We also looked at how well some of these abilities sustained over time and how they transferred to other abilities that we did not directly train. We recorded how it impacted them compared to their whole life span."
Game showed 'significant increase' in multi-tasking abilities
The researchers found that adults' multi-tasking abilities declined throughout every decade of life between the ages of 20 and 80 years.
However, when the game was tested on 16 adults between the ages of 60 and 85, the group showed a dramatic increase in their multi-tasking "costs," meaning they showed significantly improved multi-tasking abilities.
These improved abilities continued to last for 6 months without any "booster" training on the game.
The researchers note that the older adults who trained on the multi-tasking version of the game also showed benefits in other cognitive areas for which the game did not train.
For example, they showed improvement in the ability to hold attention in dull environments, as well as improvement in working memory - the ability to hold information for brief periods of time.
Additionally, EEG scans of the participants showed increased measurements in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain - the area responsible for problem solving and complex thought.
The researchers say before the game training, the pre-frontal cortex measure was deficient in older adults, compared with younger ones. However, after training, the older adults showed similar activity to the younger adults in this area.
The researchers add that these measurements also correlated with how well the multi-tasking abilities sustained after 6 months, and how much their performance improved within cognitive abilities that the game did not train.
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