People who play video games improve with practice, but does the improvement translate into real-life cognitive benefits?
Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), reported 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. The game involves using a joystick to guide a car on the computer screen along a winding road while responding to a variety of road signs — some of which require action, and others that don't. The resulting mental “cost” of this type of multitasking increases with age, causing performance to decline. The findings were published Sept. 5 in Nature.
“We were able to show they got better at multitasking on the game itself in an impressive way — even better than untrained 20-year-olds,” said Dr. Gazzaley, associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry, and director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center UCSF. “But even more importantly, they also got better at a working memory task, and a sustained attention task. When you train certain fundamental cognitive abilities you see transfer to fields that were not specifically trained, and we're starting to pull out some of the neural correlates of this plasticity.”
Electroencephalography readings suggest that those correlates involve increased theta wave activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in working memory, sustained attention, and task switching. The researchers noted a burst of activity in that region within a third of a second after a road sign appeared on the screen, requiring action on the part of the player.
“That activity was deficient in older adults before training, but after training it reached or exceeded young adult levels,” said Dr. Gazzaley. “The brain must possess some core cognitive control mechanism with network properties that overlap across different tasks.”
The researchers suspect that an increase in theta activity in the medial prefrontal area reflects suppression of the default network, which activates when the brain is not engaged in a specific task. When people master a skill such as driving in the real world they tend to go on “automatic pilot,” which allows the mind to wander while performing the task. NeuroRacer prevents this by becoming more difficult as the player's proficiency increases, thereby discouraging activity of the default network.
The failure to suppress the default network, associated with daydreaming and mind wandering, could result in distraction and a failure to attend fully to cognitive tasks, the researchers suspect. “NeuroRacer training may benefit cognitive control abilities by improving the ability of older adults to suppress the default network during task engagement, a process known to be compromised in ageing,” they wrote.
Dr. Gazzaley and his colleagues began their research by evaluating the multitasking ability of 174 participants ranging in age from 20 to 79, who played a version of NeuroRacer that required them to respond to signs while using a joystick to “drive” a car moving down a road on a computer screen. As expected, the ability of the players to multitask decreased in a linear fashion according to age, with the largest drop occurring between players in their 20s and in their 30s.
In a second experiment, the researchers randomly assigned 46 older adults to one of three groups. One group played a version of NeuroRacer that required multitasking. Another group played a version that involved responding to road signs or driving, but not both at the same time. A third group did not play the game. Members of the first two groups played NeuroRacer at home on a laptop one hour a day, three days a week, for four weeks. Assessment showed that the multitasking ability of members in the first group improved dramatically, with the mental “cost” of multitasking dropping from -64.2 percent to -16.2 percent. Even without “booster sessions,” the cost had risen only t