Older people may have good memory with digital puzzle games: Study

WASHINGTON: According to a new study, older people who play digital puzzle games have the same recall capacity as people in their twenties.

The University of York study also discovered that persons aged 60 and up who play digital puzzle games had a stronger ability to disregard irrelevant distractions, whereas older adults who play strategy games do not demonstrate the same increases in memory or attention.

It is well recognised that as humans age, their mental faculties deteriorate, notably their ability to recall multiple things at once, known as working memory. Working memory is supposed to peak between the ages of 20 and 30, then gradually decline as people age.

The previous study, however, has revealed that the way we keep knowledge in the brain varies as we age, so the York team investigated whether the effects of specific types of mental stimulation, such as gaming, differed depending on age.

Dr Fiona McNab, from the University of York’s Department of Psychology, said, “A lot of research has focused on action games, as it is thought that reacting quickly, keeping track of targets and so on helps attention and memory, but our new analysis shows that the action elements do not seem to offer significant benefits to younger adults.

“It instead seems to be the strategy elements of the games - planning and problem solving for example - that stimulates better memory and attention in young people. We don’t see this same effect in older adults, however, and more research is needed to understand why this is. We can’t yet rule out that the strategy games played by older people are not as difficult as the games played by younger people and that the level of challenge might be important in memory improvement.”

The study included older and younger adults playing digital games that they would normally play in their ‘real lives’. This resulted in a wide range of games to be tested alongside a digital experiment that required participants to memorise images, whilst being distracted.

Dr Joe Cutting, from the University of York’s Department of Computer Science, said, “Generally people have a good ability to ignore irrelevant distractions, something we call ‘encoding distraction’. We would expect for example that a person could memorise the name of a street whilst being distracted by a child or a dog, but this ability does decline as we age.

“Puzzle games for older people had this surprising ability to support mental capabilities to the extent that memory and concentration levels were the same as a 20 year-olds who had not played puzzle games.”

Older people were however more likely to forget elements committed to memory whilst being distracted if they only played strategy games, and young people were less successful at focusing attention if they played only puzzle games.

The researchers say future studies could focus on why there is a difference between the impacts of types of games depending on the age of a player and if this is connected to how the brain stores information as people age.