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NEUROSCIENCE
Study reveals plasticity in age-related cognitive decline.
Sixty-five-year-old Ann Linsey was starting to worry about how easily she got distracted from whatever she was doing. "As you get older, it seems harder to do more things at once," she says. Then she enrolled in a study to test whether playing a game could improve fading cognitive skills in older people - and was impressed by what it did for her. "I was frustrated because I felt I was losing my faculties. Now I've learnt how to focus my attention."
Commercial companies have claimed for years that computer games can make the user smarter, but have been criticized for failing to show that improved skills in the game translate into better performance in daily life1. Now a study published this week in Nature2 - the one in which Linsey participated - convincingly shows that if a game is tailored to a precise cognitive deficit, in this case multitasking in older people, it can indeed be effective.
Led by neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco, the study found that a game called NeuroRacer can help older people to improve their capacity to multitask - and the effect seems to carry over to tasks in everyday life and is still there...