After ten years of work, researchers at UC San Francisco's Neuroscape Center have developed a series of video games enhancing key cognition aspects among aging adults.
EurekAlert! reported that the games, which Adam Gazzlaley, MD, Ph.D., co-creator of the technology, says can be adapted to clinical settings "as a new form of experiential medicine," exhibited benefits on an array of essential cognitive processes, which include short-term memory, long-term memory, and attention.
Each game uses adaptive closed-loop algorithms that Gazzaley's lab pioneered in the widely noted 2013 Neuroracer research published in the Nature journal, which showed it was possible to restore reduced mental faculties in older individuals with only four weeks of training on a specially designed video game.
Such algorithms get better results than commercial games by automatically increasing or decreasing difficulty, depending on how well an individual plays the game.
The 'Plasticity' Process
That's keeping less skilled players from becoming overwhelmed while still challenging those with greater ability.
The games utilizing such algorithms are recreating common activities like driving, exercising, and playing the drum. More so, using the skills each can engender to retrain cognitive processes that turn deficient with age.
All of these, the co-creator continued, are taking experiences and delivering them in an extremely personalized, fun manner, and the brains respond through a process known as "plasticity."
Gazzaley, a neurology professor at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the founder and executive director of Neuroscape, added, "Experiences are a powerful approach to changing the brain, and this form of experience enables the researchers to deliver it in a way that's quite accessible.
Enhancing the Ability to Remember Faces
The latest invention of the laboratory is a musical rhythm game, designed in consultation with drummer Mickey Hart, that not just taught the 60 to 79-year-old participants how to play the drums but also improved their ability to remember faces.
The study published in PNAS involves an eight-week program that used visual cues to train people how to play a rhythm on an electronic tablet.
The algorithm matched the difficulty level, which includes tempo, complexity, and precision level required for a tap to be considered on-beat, to every player's ability.
Over time, the cues faded, forcing the players to memorize the rhythmic pattern. When the participants were tested at the end to find out how well they could recognize faces unfamiliar to them, electroencephalography or EEG data revealed increased activity in a brain part on the right side, involved both in sight reading music and in short-term visual memory for other tasks.
Memory Enhanced
As indicated in a similar MedMDs report, the researchers said the data specified that the training improved how individuals bring something into memory and then take it back out again when needed.
Video games offer the potential of ‘experiential medicine’ https://t.co/lCByEAzvQo
— Medmds (@Medicinemds) October 4, 2022
According to associate professor of neurology Theodore Zanto, Ph.D., from the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the director of the Neuroscience Division at Neuroscape, their memory improved, which was amazing.
He added that it is a very strong memory training component and is generalized to other memory forms.
Another game called Body Brain Trainer was also developed, and it improved a key signature of attention that decreases as people age and is associated with the ability to multitask.
Both studies target cognitive control and the ability that is deficient in older adults, which is crucial for their quality of life, Gazzaley explained.
Related information about video games for mind quality improvement is shown on UC San Francisco's YouTube video below:
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