van Muijden Jesse, Band Guido P H, Hommel Bernhard
Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University Institute of Psychology Leiden, Netherlands.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2012 Aug 17;6:221. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00221. eCollection 2012.
The prevalence of age-related cognitive decline will increase due to graying of the global population. The goal of the present study was to test whether playing online cognitive training games can improve cognitive control (CC) in healthy older adults. Fifty-four older adults (age 60-77) played five different cognitive training games online for 30 min a day over a period of seven weeks (game group). Another group of 20 older adults (age 61-73) instead answered quiz questions about documentaries online (documentary group). Transfer was assessed by means of a cognitive test battery administered before and after the intervention. The test battery included measures of working memory updating, set shifting, response inhibition, attention, and inductive reasoning. Compared with the documentary group, the game group showed larger improvement of inhibition (Stop-Signal task) and inductive reasoning (Raven-SPM), whereas the documentary group showed more improvement in selective attention (UFoV-3). These effects qualify as transfer effects, because response inhibition, inductive reasoning and selective attention were not targeted by the interventions. However, because seven other indicators of CC did not show benefits of game training and some of those that did suffered from potential baseline differences, the study as a whole provides only modest support for the potential of videogame training to improve CC in healthy older adults.
由于全球人口老龄化，与年龄相关的认知衰退患病率将会增加。本研究的目的是测试玩在线认知训练游戏是否能改善健康老年人的认知控制（CC）。54名老年人（年龄在60 - 77岁之间）在七周的时间里每天在线玩五种不同的认知训练游戏30分钟（游戏组）。另一组20名老年人（年龄在61 - 73岁之间）则在线回答关于纪录片的问答（纪录片组）。通过在干预前后进行的一组认知测试来评估迁移效果。这组测试包括工作记忆更新、任务转换、反应抑制、注意力和归纳推理等测量指标。与纪录片组相比，游戏组在抑制（停止信号任务）和归纳推理（瑞文标准渐进矩阵测验）方面有更大的改善，而纪录片组在选择性注意力（有用视野测试-3）方面有更多改善。这些效果可被视为迁移效果，因为反应抑制、归纳推理和选择性注意力并非干预的目标。然而，由于CC的其他七个指标并未显示出游戏训练的益处，并且其中一些指标存在潜在的基线差异，所以总体而言，该研究仅为电子游戏训练改善健康老年人CC的潜力提供了有限的支持。
