By Matthew Heimer
As retirees grow older, their families often tie themselves in knots trying to figure out whether they need help with daily tasks like driving, paying bills and cooking – and then figuring out how to pay for that help once they do need it. But a new study published today in the journal Nature suggests that seniors may be able to forestall the day when they need that kind of assistance, by using a rudimentary driving video game to sharpen their cognitive skills.
Neuroscientists at the University of California, San Francisco designed the game, dubbed “NeuroRacer,” to be a multitasking exercise: Players steer a car along a winding road while reacting to signs that pop up along the way. (Players are supposed to “shoot” some signs, but not others; we’ll ignore for the moment what that might say about American car culture.) People of all ages saw their performance plummet when they first added the driving task to the sign-shooting task, and not surprisingly, the older the driver was, the steeper the drop.
Playing the game more often, however, quickly improved test subjects’ multitasking skills. People who played repeatedly over a 4-week training period, during which the game grew progressively more difficult, logged measurable improvements in working memory and sustained attention–functions that almost always erode as part of the normal aging process. What’s more, those benefits persisted for a period of about six months after the training ended.
The improvement appeared particularly pronounced in players over age 60, whose scores on the game after training were comparable to those achieved by 20-somethings who hadn’t been trained. While playing, older participants in particular showed much higher-than-usual activity of their theta, a brain wave associated with sustained attention.
Neuroscientists have long doubted that age-related declines in brain function can be reversed, and there hasn’t been much scientific evidence to support the wave of brain-training games and programs that have emerged in recent decades. But the UCSF study has left some feeling cautiously optimistic that well-targeted training could obtain better results.