Brain games produce statistically significant cognitive performance gains in older adults, but gains are modest and do not detect improvements over control tasks or produce far transfer¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r3 · q2
Currency · no dated study recorded · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Experimental studies find cognitive improvements through brain games in areas including executive functioning, processing speed, planning, memory, verbal fluency, and reasoning, but do not detect improvements compared to control tasks. → Kurt Squire 2023

Evidence¶

Kurt Squire 2023¶

Kurt Squire, Garrison Wells, Maria J. Anderson-Coto, and Constance Steinkuehler. 2023. Casual Games, Cognition, and Play across the Lifespan: A Critical Synthesis. ACM Games: Research and Practice, Volume 1, Issue 2, Article 14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3594534

q2 · i? · review · r3

The review's synthesis of brain-game studies, including Gates et al.'s review of eight randomized trials totaling 1,183 participants age 65 or older, finds pre-post gains but "theydonot,however,detectimprovementscomparedtocontroltasks". No effect size is printed.

"Insum,experimentalstudiesdofindevidenceforcognitiveimprovementsthroughbraingames inareasincludingexecutivefunctioning,processingspeed,planning,memory,verbalfluency,and reasoning;theydonot,however,detectimprovementscomparedtocontroltasks[Buitenweget al. 2017]."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Computerized cognitive training produces a small but statistically significant improvement in cognitive performance in healthy older adults — related
• Multitasking training transferred to untrained working memory and sustained attention tasks in older adults, unlike control training — reports the opposite
• Training benefits did not extend to processing speed tasks, indicating specificity to cognitive control processes — related
• Multitasking training on adaptive NeuroRacer reduced older adults' multitasking costs beyond active and no-contact controls, exceeding untrained 20-year-olds, with gains persisting 6 months — reports the opposite
• Casual games show weak to no cognitive benefits compared to other interventions, except for elderly adults and people with specific cognitive impairments — related
• Cognitive benefits of balance training do not differ by age in adults aged 19–65 — related
• Speed-of-processing training based on UFOV tasks reduces minimum duration thresholds in older adults, with benefits persisting up to two years — related
• Speed-of-processing training transfers to health and functional outcomes including reduced crash risk, improved driving, faster daily-task completion, slower health-related quality-of-life decline, and reduced depression risk — related
• Explicit transfer instructions, in which trainees discuss how trained strategies could apply to a new task, produced reliable transfer of imagery and sentence-generation training to unpracticed text learning in older adults — related
• Video-game play and mind-brain training literatures suggest the possibility of training selective attention — related