Can Older Adults Enhance Their Cognitive Skills?

➣ By Chandramallika Basak

With a growing population of older adults, we are faced with pragmatic concerns of managing an aging society. There is a growing interest in developing deeper understanding of cognitive and brain enhancement that may allow for a longer “cognitively fit” lifestyle. Ideally, research programs should focus on not only increasing the quantitative aspect, but also the qualitative aspect of our lifespan. Successful aging in some cognitive dimensions is related to early life-span experience, such as education, as well as various lifestyle factors from mid and later life, such as exercise. The solution is not only to explore lifestyle factors, where, sometimes, individual differences in multiple unknown aspects could be guiding our choices in such factors, but also to conduct randomized clinical trials to see if training induces brain and cognitive plasticity that offsets our age-related declines. That is, an effective training protocol should not only improve the targeted abilities that the person is being trained on, but also a varied set of untrained skills.

One such effective training paradigm in senior adults has been real-time strategy videogame training. In a recent study by Basak, Boot, Voss and Kramer (2008), we trained older adults age 65 or older in a real-time strategy video game for about 24 hours. We collected their performances on a variety of cognitive skills before and after training, and compared them to an age and gender matched group of older adults who did not receive any videogame training. The group that received video game training improved not only on the video game performance but also on some of the higher-level cognitive skills that are typically sub served by frontal and parietal cortices. Some of these untrained skills that the training group improved on more than the untrained group were reasoning, multitasking and working memory. Also, improved performance on the videogame was related to improved performance in multitasking and working memory.

More studies need to be conducted in this domain to understand what types of videogames improve various types of cognition (for example, attention vs. memory), how long an effective training should last, what are the neural correlates of the training induced cognitive plasticity, and how long do we retain the benefits of the training. It is also important to have a more appropriate control group that would receive the same hours of training in another set of skills, under similar social interaction, so that video game training related changes are not merely attributable to interaction with the computer or experimenter. For example, older adults can be trained on strategy based videogames, which could be the target group that is expected to improve in control processes, memory and reasoning, or on videogames that are less complex or tap into other skills, which would formulate the control group (see Figure, below left.)

The amount of training (x) could potentially vary to explore the effects of dose-response of the video game training in the aging population, and the retention period (y) could be varied as well to understand the long-term effects of transfer and learning. The improvement from baseline to post-testing in the various untrained tasks would assess the effects of transfer, whereas the improvements in the trained task itself (i.e., the video games) would assess learning of the game.

Given that with age, deficits in memory and control processes increase, and in many cases are pathological (e.g., dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease), it is of interest to know whether computer-based training could offset these declines, and allow us to live a cognitively healthier life in old age. Computer- based training can also be an appropriate intervention for older adults who are not mobile enough to get much physical exercise. The neural correlates of these improvements would guide us further in understanding brain plasticity that goes hand in hand with cognitive plasticity.

Chandramallika Basak, Ph.D.
Rice University
U.S.A.
Chandramallika.Basak@rice.edu