Word: gamely
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...claims made by many brain-boosting websites and digital games, however, would have you believing otherwise. HAPPYneuron, a $100 Web-based brain-training site, entices visitors to "give the gift of brain fitness" and claims that its users saw "16%+ improvement" through exercises such as learning to associate a bird's song with its species and shooting basketballs through virtual hoops. Nintendo's best-selling Brain Age game promises to "give your brain the workout it needs" through exercises like solving math problems and playing rock, paper, scissors on the handheld...
Skeptics of such products say these claims are about as credible as a slicer-dicer infomercial. But others point to video-game research that suggests digital diversions have many advantages over similar analog training tools. "Video games are very integrative in nature. You have to multitask a lot," says Chandramallika Basak, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. In the PC-based game Rise of Nations, on which Basak published a paper last year in Psychology and Aging, multitasking involves managing an empire with multiple cities and simultaneously defending one locale from attack while reviving...
...level of working memory, attention and reaction time that the younger group had at the outset. (Notably, the younger group had even greater improvements by the end of the training period.) "The program is always pushing them to do better," says Westerberg, who notes that an advantage of video-game training is that the programs' difficulty level continually adjusts upward to match players' evolving abilities. "They have feedback and can see their scores...
McLaughlin and Allaire's new study will follow 270 seniors as they play the Wii game Boom Blox. Game play involves demolishing targets like a medieval castle or a spaceship using an arsenal of weapons such as slingshots and cannonballs. While those particular skills may not seem transferable to offscreen life, McLaughlin says she and her colleagues chose Boom Blox specifically because it requires a wide range of real-world skills, including memory, special ability, reasoning and problem-solving...
Ultimately, the researchers hope to determine which aspects of Boom Blox produce the largest gains in real-world cognitive functioning, like the ability to multitask, then incorporate those elements into a new game of their own design. They will then study the effects of the new game in the same group of elderly players. "One of our main goals is to produce guidelines for producing games for older adults. Part of it is making it fun so it does not feel like work," adds McLaughlin...