Scientists have developed a variety of games designed to boost older adults’ cognitive capacity. Co-creator Professor Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, said the games can be an “experiential medicine”. The games adapt to the players’ skill on the fly, and were shown to confer benefits on many important cognitive processes such as short-term memory, attention and long-term memory.
Each game uses adaptive closed-loop algorithms that Dr Gazzaley’s lab pioneered in the widely cited 2013 Neuroracer study published in Nature, 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. The most recent game, which uses drumming, is described in in PNAS.
These algorithms get better results than commercial games by automatically adjusting in difficulty according to the players’ skills. 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 decline with age.
“All of these are taking experiences and delivering them in a very personalised, fun manner, and our brains respond through a process called plasticity,” said Prof Gazzaley at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and who is founder and executive director of Neuroscape. “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 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.
The eight-week program used visual cues to train people how to play a rhythm on an electronic tablet, with an algorithm matching difficulty to the 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, electroencephalography (EEG) data showed increased activity in a part of the brain on the right side (the superior parietal lobule) that is involved both in sight reading music and in short-term visual memory for other tasks. The researchers said the data indicate that the training improved how people bring something into memory and then take it back out again when they need it.
A second game, the Body Brain Trainer, published recently in NPJ Aging, improved blood pressure, balance and attention in a group of healthy older adults with eight weeks of training, as well as a key signature of attention that declines with age. The game also included a feedback mechanism.
“We had people wearing a heart rate monitor, and we were getting that heart rate data and feeding it into the game,” said Joaquin A. Anguera, PhD, associate professor of neurology at UCSF and director of the Clinical Division at Neuroscape. “If they weren’t working hard enough, the game got harder.”
Neuroscape published the results of a third 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.
“These are all targeting cognitive control, an ability that is deficient in older adults and that is critical for their quality of life,” Prof 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.”
