urnal, Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, said the Nature paper was “excellently planned and executed.”
Dr. Gordon, therapeutic cognitive neuroscience professor at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, was impressed by the size of the effects produced by playing NeuroRacer.
“That's impressive in and of itself,” he said. “Obviously what's necessary is replication and extension to see if results hold up, and can be teased apart.”
TUNE IN: Will playing a video game improve cognition in normal older adults? In some ways, yes, according to Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco. They reported in a Sept. 5 paper in Nature there were improvements in attention, working memory, cognitive control, and multitasking in 16 older adults ages 60-85 who played a simulated driving game called NeuroRacer for a total of 12 hours over four weeks. In this video, Dr. Gazzaley and a coauthor Joaquin Anguera, PhD, describe their findings as study participants play the game using a joystick to guide a car on the computer screen along a winding road while responding to a variety of road signs. Watch the video here: http://bit.ly/aNQ4KB.
LINK UP FOR MORE INFORMATION:
•. Anguera JA, Boccanfuso J, Rintoul JL, et al. Video game training enhances cognitive control in older adults. Nature
•. Haring AE, Zhuravleva TY, Alperin B, et al. Age-related differences in enhancement and suppression of neural activity underlying selective attention in matched young and old adults. Brain Research
•. Green CS, Pouget A, Bavelier D. Improved probabilistic inference as a general learning mechanism with action video games. Current Biol 2010;20(17):1573–1579.© 2013 American Academy of Neurology
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