A computer game may help some older adults improve the kind of memory needed to function every day and maintain independent living, researchers say.
Older adults who played the game Virtual Week for a month "more than doubled" their successful performance to a number of tasks involving what's known as prospective memory -- involved in planning and remembering tasks such as taking daily medication or bringing in the mail -- compared with adults involved in other activities, researchers said.
In the digital board game developed by a team led by the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences in Canada, players simulated living through the course of a day on a Monopoly-like computer game board.
Rolling a virtual die to move forward, they had to simulate performing daily tasks such as remembering to turn off the oven after cooking meals or getting the mail, by selecting the appropriate "perform task" button at the correct time.
Over the course of the month-long training, the difficulty of the game was adjusted by increasing the number of daily tasks to be completed and their complexity, the researchers explained.
Prospective memory tends to become weaker with age, and is involved in around 50 to 80 percent of reported daily memory issues, the team of international scientists noted.
"As the world's population ages, it is becoming increasingly important to develop ways to support successful prospective memory functioning so that older adults can continue to live independently at home without the need for assisted care," says lead study investigator Dr. Nathan Rose in the School of Psychology at the Australian Catholic University.
Virtual Week was played by 59 adults aged 60 to 79 for a month, with testing of their prospective memory performance before and after playing the game.
The test subjects were able to double the number of prospective memory tasks correctly performed compared to control groups that received music-based cognitive training or no training at all, the researchers reported.
Brain scans of some study participants also showed neuoroplasticity, changes in the brain suggesting improved memory performance, the researchers said.
Results in the lab were found echoed in real-life improvements in performance, said study senior author Dr. Fergus Craik, a memory researcher at Baycrest in Toronto.
"Perhaps the most exciting aspect is that training in the lab resulted in improvements in real-life memory tasks," he says. "This lab-to-life transfer has been difficult to achieve in previous studies."
