Staying Sharp with Video Games
In an interesting study, a slightly older group of 40 non-gamer adults in the Forty Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, community, with an average age of 69, was randomly divided into two groups. The lucky group was asked to play the real-time strategy game, Rise of Nations Gold Edition (RON). RON combines the speed of real-time gaming and the complexity of turnbased strategy games. In the game, the players had to build new cities, improve city infrastructure, and expand their national borders.
The game has several ways in which victory can be achieved. One is through conquering other via military might but, other paths to victory include building a set of world wonders, diplomacy and through technological victory. A series of cognitive tests were administered to track executive control and visuospatial skills.
The second group, the control group, only got to take the cognitive tests and did not get to play the game. The purpose of this group was to provide a standard of comparison.
The results indicated that the group who played Rise of Nations improved significantly more than the control participants in executive control functions, of task switching, working memory, visual short-term memory, and reasoning
So video games help older individuals to stay mentally sharp!
.
Source: Basak, C., Boot, W.R., Voss, M. W. & Kramer, A. F. (2008) Can Training in a Real-Time Strategy Video Game Attenuate Cognitive Decline in Older Adults? Psychology and Aging. Vol. 23, No. 4, 765–777.
Posted in: Games
Leave a Comment (2) ↓
Rajneesh, It does help with children as well, I’ll post on that tomorrow, thanks for the question and buy your child a “GameBoy” 🙂 Actually, it was the strategy game that really encouraged the learning so strategy games are helpful. Other types of games may not be as effective. So the right game is as important as the right hardware.
This article is very interesting because ID is concerned with how to help student encode information. It appears from your posting that games seem to advance behavioral and cognitive abilities in elder people. I wonder if such research is true for children as well. Perhaps you should be encouraging your child to pick his GameBoy up instead of putting it down?