Earlier this year, a large-scale study of ‘brain training’ games debunked the idea that they can improve general cognitive abilities in healthy young people. But now a new study suggests that at least one such game can improve cognitive abilities and can even transfer improvements to real-world skills in the older generation.
Researchers led by Karlene Ball of the University of Alabama at Birmingham split 908 volunteers with an average age of around 73 into four different groups as part of the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) clinical trial.
The first group played a game designed to improve the speed of their visual attention for up to 10 hours over a five week period. This involved identifying and locating visual information quickly in increasingly demanding visual displays. The second group was taught strategies to improve memory without using a computer for the same time period. The third group was taught to improve their reasoning and problem-solving skills for up to 10 hours, again without using a computer, and the fourth group acted as a control.
Driving records of all the study participants were then followed for six years and showed that those who played the games or underwent reasoning training crashed their cars 50% less than the control group says the paper, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS) . There was no significant difference observed in the group taught strategies to improve memory.
Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Oxford, UK and University College London have shown that maths skills can be improved by stimulating the brain with electricity, perhaps removing the need for brain training games altogether.
“I am certainly not advising people to go around giving themselves electric shocks,” says Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford, who led the study, published in the journal Current Biology. “Electrical stimulation will most likely not turn you into Albert Einstein, but it might help some people to cope better with maths.”
A weak current was applied to participants’ parietal lobes – an area of the brain involved in numerical understanding – for 20 minutes before they began learning the associations between a series of nine arbitrary symbols to which the researchers had secretly assigned numerical values. A control group thought they were receiving the same electrical treatment, but were not.
Subjects who received the electrical treatment showed an enhanced ability to grasp the relationships between the symbols compared with the control group. Remarkably, the improvements were still seen six months after completing the training.
The technique, known as transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), can be used to selectively excite or inhibit brain cells, and is rising in prominence in neuroscience.
The researchers hope their work can be used to help people with severe numerical disabilities and to rehabilitate those who have suffered strokes or degenerative disease.