Casual gaming may improve mental agility

A study under way at East Carolina University (ECU), to be completed later this year, has taken on people aged 50 or older and is looking at the effects of playing such casual games. So far, the results point to “sizable improvements”, it claims.
News of the study emerges as Dr Carmen Russoniello, director of the Psychophysiology Lab and Biofeedback Clinic at ECU, is presenting initial data and analysis from the study today at the 6th annual Games for Health Conference in Boston.

“The initial results of the study are very intriguing, in that they suggest that the ‘active participation’ required while playing a casual video game like Bejeweled provides an opportunity for mental exercise that more passive activities, like watching television, do not,” said Russoniello.

“Future applications could include prescriptive applications using casual video games to potentially stave off Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia-type disorders.”

More than 40 test subjects have taken part in the study where the participants’ electroencephalography (EEG) brain waves were measured to track cognitive response time (the speed with which a subject completes a task) and executive function (the frequency of correctly completing parts of the task).

Those subjects who played casual games for short (30-minute) periods showed an 87pc improvement in cognitive response time and a 215pc increase in executive functioning in comparison to the control group.

These findings are interesting when compared to a recent study, commissioned by the BBC and published in th science journal Nature, that took 11,430 participants for six weeks and had them train several times a week on cognitive tasks designed to improve reasoning, memory, planning, visuospatial skills and attention.

It was found that while the participants did get better at these specific cognitive tasks within the brain training game, there was no evidence that the cognitive improvements were applicable to untrained tasks, even ones that were cognitively closely related.

Free Rummy Online News, May 2010