Two recent sci­en­tific stud­ies pub­lished by Dr. Arthur Kramer and col­leagues present fas­ci­nat­ing results. The two stud­ies are:

1) Basak C, et al “Can train­ing in a real-time strat­egy video game atten­u­ate cog­ni­tive decline in older adults?” Psy­chol Aging 2008; DOI: 10.1037/a0013494.

2) Boot, W. R., Kramer, A. F., Simons, D. J., Fabi­ani, M. & Grat­ton, G. (2008) The effects of video game play­ing on atten­tion, mem­ory, and exec­u­tive con­trol. Acta Psy­cho­log­ica, 129, 387–398.

Let’s first review the first study, a sig­nif­i­cant exper­i­ment in that it showed wide cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits in adults over 60 years old who played a strat­egy videogame (Rise of Nations) for 23 hours.

Play­ing com­puter games improves brain power of older adults, claim sci­en­tists (Telegraph)

- The team at the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois recruited 40 adults over 60 years old, half of whom were asked to play a com­puter game called Rise of Nations, a role-playing game in which you have to build your own empire.

- Game play­ers have to build cities, feed and employ their peo­ple, main­tain an ade­quate mil­i­tary and expand their territory.

- Both groups were assessed before, dur­ing and after the video game train­ing on a vari­ety of tests.

- As a group, the “gamers” became sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter and faster at switch­ing between tasks as com­pared to the com­par­i­son group. Their work­ing mem­ory, as reflected in the tests, was also sig­nif­i­cantly improved and their rea­son­ing abil­ity was enhanced.

Really remark­able results.

The sec­ond study, in con­trast, found no com­pa­ra­ble cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits for col­lege stu­dents in their early 20s who played the same game for the same num­ber of hours, regard­less of whether they play videogames often or don’t.
How come this contrast?

In order to bet­ter under­stand this, we con­tacted Arthur Kramer and asked him to elab­o­rate on what he told us in our first inter­view. Let’s first review what we dis­cussed in June:

Ques­tion (me): Tell us more about your work with cog­ni­tive train­ing for older adults.

Answer (Prof Kramer): We have now a study in press where we eval­u­ate the effect of a com­mer­cially avail­able strat­egy videogame on older adults cognition.

Let me first give some con­text. It seems clear that, as we age, our so-called crys­tal­lized abil­i­ties remain pretty sta­ble, whereas the so-called fluid abil­i­ties decline. One par­tic­u­lar set of fluid abil­i­ties are called exec­u­tive func­tions, which deal with exec­u­tive con­trol, plan­ning, deal­ing with ambi­gu­ity, pri­or­i­tiz­ing, multi-tasking. These skills are cru­cial to main­tain inde­pen­dent living.

In this study, we exam­ined whether play­ing strategy-based video game can train those exec­u­tive func­tions and improve them. We showed that play­ing a strategy-based videogame (Rise of Nations Gold Edi­tion) can result in not only becom­ing a bet­ter videogame player but it trans­ferred to untrained exec­u­tive func­tions. We saw a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in task switch­ing, work­ing mem­ory, visual short-term mem­ory, and men­tal rota­tion. And some, but more lim­ited, ben­e­fits in inhi­bi­tion and reasoning.

I can share a few details on the study: the aver­age age was 69 years, and the exper­i­ment required around 23 hours of train­ing time. We only included indi­vid­u­als who had played videogames 0 hours/ week for the last 2 years.

That last cri­te­ria is inter­est­ing. We typ­i­cally say that good “brain exer­cise” requires nov­elty, vari­ety and chal­lenge. So, if you take adults who are 69-years-old and haven’t played a videogame in 2 years, how do you know if the ben­e­fit comes from the par­tic­u­lar videogame they played vs. just the value of deal­ing with a new and com­plex task?

That’s a great ques­tion. The real­ity is that we don’t know, since we had a “wait­ing list” con­trol group. In the future per­haps we should com­pare dif­fer­ent videogames or other men­tally stim­u­lat­ing activ­i­ties against each other and see what method is the most effi­cient. Per­haps the National Insti­tutes on Health may be inter­ested in fund­ing such research.

In any case, your study rein­forces an impor­tant point: older brains can, and do, learn new skills.

Yes. The rate of learn­ing by older adults may be slower, and they may ben­e­fit from more explicit instruc­tion and tech­nol­ogy train­ing, but, as a soci­ety, it is a mas­sive waste of tal­ent not to ensure older adults remain active and productive.

Full inter­view: here

And below are his answers to my new ques­tions last week, after both stud­ies were published.

What may, in your view, explain the dif­fer­ent effect of Rise of Nations on non-gamers, con­trast­ing both stud­ies?
Cer­tainly one of the most notable between our two stud­ies was the age of the study par­tic­i­pants with young adults serv­ing as sub­jects in the Acta Psy­cho­log­ica paper and older adults serv­ing as sub­jects in the Psy­chol­ogy & Aging study. We observed train­ing ben­e­fits for the older but not for the younger adults. There are sev­eral rea­sons why this might have been the case. First, older adults per­form more poorly on the tar­get abil­i­ties that we were try­ing to train that is exec­u­tive con­trol processes  than younger adults. So it might be the case that video game train­ing ben­e­fits are more read­ily observed for cog­ni­tive processes that are some­what degraded. Sec­ond, while it is quite easy to find older adults who have never played video games (and espe­cially strategy-based games like Rise Of Nations) it is very dif­fi­cult to find com­pletely nave younger adults (although the younger adults sub­jects in our study did play video games less than 1 hour per week). So it is con­ceiv­able that video game train­ing based gains might be more read­ily observed the less expe­ri­ence that some­one has with video games. These seem to be the most likely rea­sons for the dif­fer­ent effects in the two studies.

What is the main impli­ca­tion from both stud­ies combined/ what do we know today that we didn’t know 3 months ago?
First, I think that our results sug­gest promise with regard to video game play­ing and older adults cog­ni­tion. How­ever, given, to my knowl­edge, this is the first attempt to improve exec­u­tive con­trol abil­i­ties of older adults via strategy-based video game play­ing cer­tainly addi­tional stud­ies should be con­ducted to fur­ther explore this rela­tion­ship, par­tic­u­larly with real-world tasks as trans­fer tasks. Sec­ond, the results of our study with younger adults sug­gest that cau­tion is in order with regard to assum­ing that video game train­ing will enhanc­ing, per­cep­tual, atten­tional and cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties of young peo­ple. Clearly, there are impor­tant bound­ary con­di­tions of such rela­tion­ships that we don’t yet know.

Be Socia­ble, Share!

•