A computerized brain training program improves perception and memory in older adults, says a study published yesterday in PLoS ONE. The study was funded by California-based Posit Science, one of the biggies among brain training companies. The researchers say it’s the first demonstration that training preception improves a more general function – working memory.
Brain training computer games that claim to keep one’s memory and other cognitive faculties sharp even as we age have become something of a fad, but studies on whether or not such training works have shown mixed results. The biggest issue: while subjects invariably boost their performance on the specific tasks the games train, there’s been precious little evidence that these benefits carry over into improvements in memory or nimbleness of thought – faculties that folks rely on when they step away from the computer.
In the PLoS ONE study, conducted by neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco as well as three employees of Posit Science, 15 people aged 60 to 89 underwent 10 hours of computer training over three to five weeks using Posit’s software. Essentially, subjects were asked to judge whether stripes on a computer screen expanded or contracted. The better a subject did, the harder the next item was.
The aim, says Gazzaley, was to train on a “really really low-level” task and see how it transfered.
Participants’ performance was compared, before and after training, to that of 15 control subjects, who received no intervention of any kind. Performance on all the tasks examined is known to deteriorate with age.
Unsurprisingly, people who received the training did better than controls on the trained task. But they also did better on a perceptual task the computer program didn’t include – determining whether a set of dots on a screen was moving in the same direction as a second set of dots, presented 2 seconds earlier.
A second untrained task, designed to test more general memory functions, showed mixed results. Like the first untrained task, this one required subjects to indicate whether a set of dots on the screen was moving in the same direction as an earlier presented set of dots. In one condition, the delay between the two stimuli was simply increased more than three-fold. In that case, trained subjects did indeed do about 10% better than untrained ones – in fact, their performance was as good as much younger subjects. But in a second condition, where an interrupting stimulus consisting of dots swirling on the screen flashed up during the delay period, trained subjects did no better than controls.
“We think it’s interesting that there are some benefits [to training] and some limitations,” says Gazzaley. Performance on such interference tasks shows especially strong decline in aging, he adds, but it might be possible to train that specifically.
Finally, the researchers showed that subjects whose memory improved experienced a drop in brain activity – suggesting, according to a UCSF press release, that “the brain didn’t have to work as hard to take in information”.
A massive Nature study on brain training published a few months ago on 11,400 volunteers aged between 18 and 60 found that brain training had no beneficial effects on cognition. But Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brian Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, and that study’s main author, writes in an email that “[i]t isn’t possible to relate our study reported earlier this year to their study, because there is absolutely no overlap in the ages of the participants”. Unlike subjects in that study, many of the older subjects tested here are probably experiencing cognitive decline, so a training program may affect them differently than younger adults. Owen’s team plans to report data on 60+ adults later this year.
Image: Perceptual discrimination paradigm on which subjects were trained / PLoS ONE.