Scientists in the US have developed a suite of video game interventions that improve key aspects of cognition in ageing adults.
The games, which can be adapted to clinical populations as a new form of “experiential medicine,” showed benefits on a number of important cognitive processes, including short-term memory, attention and long-term memory.
The games employ adaptive closed-loop algorithms that co-creator Adam Gazzaley MD, PhD pioneered in the 2013 Neuroracer study published in Nature.
The study was the first to demonstrate it was possible to restore diminished mental faculties in older people with just four weeks of training on a specially-designed video game.
The algorithms achieve better results than commercial games by automatically increasing or decreasing in difficulty, depending on how well someone is performing.
This keeps less skilled players from becoming overwhelmed, while still challenging those with greater ability.
The games using these algorithms recreate common activities, such as driving and exercising, and use the skills each can help to retrain cognitive processes that become deficient with age.
Gazzaley, who is professor of neurology in the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the founder and executive director of Neuroscape, said:
“All of these are taking experiences and delivering them in a very personalised, fun manner, and our brains respond through a process called plasticity.
“Experiences are a powerful way of changing our brain, and this form of experience allows us to deliver it in a manner that’s very accessible.”
The lab’s most recent invention is a musical rhythm game, developed in consultation with former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.
The game not only taught the 60 to 79-year-old participants how to drum, but also improved their ability to remember faces.
The eight-week programme used visual cues to teach people how to play a rhythm on an electronic tablet.
The algorithm matched the degree of difficulty—including tempo, complexity and level of precision required—to each player’s ability.
The cues disappeared over time, forcing the players to memorise the rhythmic pattern.
When the participants were tested at the end to see how well they could recognise unfamiliar faces, EEG data showed increased activity in the parietal lobule that is involved both in sight reading music and in short-term visual memory for other tasks.
The data indicate that the training improved how people bring something into memory and then take it back out again when they need it, the researchers said.
Theodore Zanto, PhD, an associate professor of neurology in the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and director of the Neuroscience Division at Neuroscape, said:
“That memory improved at all was amazing,” said “There is a very strong memory training component to this, and it generalised to other forms of memory.”
A second game, the Body Brain Trainer, improved balance, blood pressure and attention in a group of healthy older adults with eight weeks of training.
Joaquin A. Anguera, PhD, associate professor of neurology in the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and director of the Clinical Division at Neuroscape.
“We had people wearing a heart rate monitor, and we were getting that heart rate data and feeding it into the game.
“If they weren’t working hard enough, the game got harder.”
And in a third study last year, the virtual reality spatial navigation game Labyrinth improved long-term memory in older adults after four weeks of training.
All three studies demonstrated their results in randomised clinical trials, further establishing the finding from 2013 that digital training can enhance waning cognitive faculties in older adults.
Gazzaley said:
“These are all targeting cognitive control, an ability that is deficient in older adults and that is critical for their quality of life.
“These games all have the same underlying adaptive algorithms and approach, but they are using very, very different types of activity.
And in all of them we show that you can improve cognitive abilities in this population.”
