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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Diverse Digital Interventions Remediate Cognitive Aging in Healthy Older Adults [ucsf.edu]:

After a decade of work, scientists at UC San Francisco's Neuroscape Center have developed a suite of video game interventions that improve key aspects of cognition in aging adults.

The games, which co-creator Adam Gazzaley [ucsf.edu], MD, PhD, says can be adapted to clinical populations as a new form of "experiential medicine," showed benefits on an array of important cognitive processes, including short-term memory, attention and long-term memory.

Each employs adaptive closed-loop algorithms that Gazzaley's lab pioneered in the widely cited 2013 Neuroracer study published in Nature [nature.com], which first demonstrated it was possible to restore diminished mental faculties in older people with just four weeks of training on a specially designed video game.

These algorithms achieve better results than commercial games by automatically increasing or decreasing in difficulty, depending on how well someone is playing the game. That 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, exercising and playing a drum, and use the skills each can engender to retrain cognitive processes that become deficient with age.

[...] The lab's most recent invention is a musical rhythm game, developed in consultation with drummer Mickey Hart, that not only taught the 60 to 79-year-old participants how to drum, but also improved their ability to remember faces. [...]

[...] A second game, the Body Brain Trainer [vimeo.com], published recently in NPJ Aging [nature.com], improved blood pressure, balance and attention in a group of healthy older adults with eight weeks of training. [...]

[...] Neuroscape published the results of yet another study last year in Scientific Reports on a virtual reality spatial navigation game called Labyrinth that improved long-term memory in older adults after four weeks of training.

All three studies demonstrated their results in randomized clinical trials, extending the finding from 2013 that digital training can enhance waning cognitive faculties in older adults.

"These are all targeting cognitive control, an ability that is deficient in older adults and that is critical for their quality of life," Gazzaley said. "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."

Previously:
    Gaming Can Improve our Cognitive Abilities [soylentnews.org]
    Video Game Approved as Prescription Medicine [soylentnews.org]

Journal References:
    Theodore P. Zanto, Vinith Johnson, Avery Ostrand, and Adam Gazzaley, How musical rhythm training improves short-term memory for faces, PNAS, 2022. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2201655119 [doi.org]
    Anguera, J.A., Volponi, J.J., Simon, A.J. et al. Integrated cognitive and physical fitness training enhances attention abilities in older adults [open]. npj Aging 8, 12 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41514-022-00093-y [doi.org]
    Wais, P.E., Arioli, M., Anguera-Singla, R. et al. Virtual reality video game improves high-fidelity memory in older adults [open]. Sci Rep 11, 2552 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-82109-3 [doi.org]

Original Submission