Posts tagged cognitive training
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Targeted brain training may help you multitask better
The area of the brain involved in multitasking and ways to train it have been identified by a research team at the IUGM Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal and the University of Montreal. The research includes a model to better predict the effectiveness of this training. Cooking while having a conversation, watching a movie while browsing the Web, or driving while listening to a radio show – multitasking is an essential skill in our daily lives. Unfortunately, it decreases with age, which makes it harder for seniors to keep up, causes them stress, and decreases their confidence. Many commercial software applications promise to improve this ability through exercises. But are these exercises truly effective, and how do they work on the brain? The team addresses these issues in two papers published in AGE and PLOS ONE.
Targeted Action for a Specific Result
The findings are important because they may help scientists develop better targeted cognitive stimulation programs or improve existing training programs. Specialists sometimes question the usefulness of exercises that may be ineffective simply because they are poorly structured. “To improve your cardiovascular fitness, most people know you need to run laps on the track and not work on your flexibility. But the way targeted training correlates to cognition has been a mystery for a long time. Our work shows that there is also an association between the type of cognitive training performed and the resulting effect. This is true for healthy seniors who want to improve their attention or memory and is particularly important for patients who suffer from damage in specific areas of the brain. We therefore need to better understand the ways to activate certain areas of the brain and target this action to get specific results,” explained Sylvie Belleville, who led the research.
Researchers are now better able to map these effects on the functioning of very specific areas of the brain. Will we eventually be able to adapt the structure of our brains through highly targeted training? “We have a long road ahead to get to that point, and we don’t know for sure if that would indeed be a desirable outcome. However, our research findings can be used right away to improve the daily lives of aging adults as well as people who suffer from brain damage,” Dr. Belleville said.
The Right Combination of Plasticity and Attentional Control
In one of the studies, 48 seniors were randomly allocated to training that either worked on plasticity and attentional control or only involved simple practice. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate the impact of this training on various types of attentional tasks and on brain function. The team showed that training on plasticity and attentional control helped the participants develop their ability to multitask. However, performing two tasks simultaneously was not what improved this skill. For the exercises, the research participants instead had to modulate the amount of attention given to each task. They were first asked to devote 80% of their attention to task A and 20% to task B and then change the ratio to 50:50 or 20:80. This training was the only type that increased functioning in the middle prefrontal region, or the area known to be responsible for multitasking abilities and whose activation decreases with age. The researchers used this data to create a predictive model of the effects of cognitive training on the brain based on the subjects’ characteristics.
(Source: eurekalert.org)
Training the Brain to Focus
About one in 10 school children suffers from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Linked to measurable differences in children’s brain structures and brain waves, ADHD can have dire effects on children’s academic achievements and lead to disrupted classrooms.
The CDC reports that as many as 3 million American elementary school children now take medications to control their symptoms. But these drugs don’t work for everyone. Worse, their potential side effects can have serious consequences for kids who also have heart conditions, eating or digestive problems or mood disorders such as depression.
In a recent study, Naomi J. Steiner, director of the CATS Project (Computer Attention Training in Schools for children with ADHD) at Tufts Medical Center, and her colleagues found that computer-based attention-training exercises significantly improved the ability of kids with ADHD to focus and pay attention.
The team tested two kinds of computer training systems. The first, computer cognitive attention training, uses computerized brain exercises to strengthen key mental skills such as short-term memory, eye-hand coordination and visual processing through a series of game-like activities. The second, neurofeedback, measures children’s brain waves in real time and provides visual and auditory feedback that can help them harness their ability to focus. The researchers found that both systems ameliorated the symptoms of ADHD, with neurofeedback outperforming computer cognitive attention training.
What’s more, the team found that the effect lasted months after the computer-based training sessions ended. The results of the large-scale clinical trial, published earlier this year in the journal Pediatrics, bolster the positive findings Steiner and her colleagues saw in a pilot study they conducted previously.
That’s encouraging news, because these therapies—some of which are commercially available to the public and many of which have been adopted by school systems in every state—aren’t yet covered by health insurance policies, nor will they be without a data showing their efficacy. Steiner’s body of research is one more step down that road. (See the story “Your Brain on Video Games.”)
(Image: Shutterstock)
Research Shows Strategic Thinking Strengthens Intellectual Capacity
Strategy-based cognitive training has the potential to enhance cognitive performance and spill over to real-life benefit according to a data-driven perspective article by the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. The research-based perspective highlights cognitive, neural and real-life changes measured in randomized clinical trials that compared a gist-reasoning strategy-training program to memory training in populations ranging from teenagers to healthy older adults, individuals with brain injury to those at-risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
“Our brains are wired to be inspired,” said Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, founder and chief director of the Center for BrainHeath and Dee Wyly Distinguished University Chair at The University of Texas at Dallas. “One of the key differences in our studies from other interventional research aimed at improving cognitive abilities is that we did not focus on specific cognitive functions such as speed of processing, memory, or learning isolated new skills. Instead, the gist reasoning training program encouraged use of a common set of multi-dimensional thinking strategies to synthesize information and elimination of toxic habits that impair efficient brain performance.”
The training across the studies was short, ranging from 8 to 12 sessions delivered over one to two months in 45 to 60 minute time periods. The protocol focused on three cognitive strategies — strategic attention, integrated reasoning and innovation. These strategies are hierarchical in nature and can be broadly applied to most complex daily life mental activities.
At a basic level, research participants were encouraged to filter competing information that is irrelevant and focus only on important information. At more advanced levels, participants were instructed to generate interpretations, themes or generalized statements from information they were wanting or needing to read, for example. Each strategy built on previous strategies and research participants were challenged to integrate all steps when tackling mental activities both inside and outside of training.
“Cognitive gains were documented in trained areas such as abstracting, reasoning, and innovating,” said Chapman. “And benefits also spilled over to untrained areas such as memory for facts, planning, and problem solving. What’s exciting about this work is that in randomized trials comparing gist reasoning training to memory training, we found that it was not learning new information that engaged widespread brain networks and elevated cognitive performance, but rather actually deeper processing of information and using that information in new ways that augmented brain performance.
Strengthening intellectual capacity is no longer science fiction; what used to seem improbable is now in the realm of reality.”
Positive physical changes within the brain and cognitive improvement across populations in response to strategy-based mental training demonstrate the neuro-regenerative potential of the brain.
“The ability to recognize, synthesize and create the essence of complex ideas and problems to solve are fundamental skills for academic, occupational and real-life success,” Chapman said. “The capacity to enhance cognition and complex neural networks in health, after injury or disease diagnosis will have major implications to preventing, diagnosing and treating cognitive decline and enhancing cognitive performance in youth to prepare them for an unknown future and in middle age to older adults who want to remain mentally robust.”
Brain Training May Help Clear Cognitive Fog Caused by Chemotherapy
The mental fuzziness induced by cancer treatment could be eased by cognitive exercises performed online, say researchers.
Cancer survivors sometimes suffer from a condition known as “chemo fog”—a cognitive impairment caused by repeated chemotherapy. A study hints at a controversial idea: that brain-training software might help lift this cognitive cloud.
Various studies have concluded that cognitive training can improve brain function in both healthy people and those with medical conditions, but the broader applicability of these results remains controversial in the field.
In a study published in the journal Clinical Breast Cancer, investigators report that those who used a brain-training program for 12 weeks were more cognitively flexible, more verbally fluent, and faster-thinking than survivors who did not train.
Patients treated with chemotherapy show changes in brain structure and function in line with diffuse brain injury, and they often report long-term cognitive effects, says Shelli Kesler, a Stanford University clinical neuropsychologist who led the research. The new study “suggests that cognitive training could be one possible avenue for helping to improve cognitive function in breast cancer survivors treated with chemotherapy,” she says.
The results may not convince everyone. “One of the biggest challenges in the cognitive training world is to show an effect that generalizes to real-world functioning,” says Susan Landau, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Several companies offer commercial cognitive training programs that promise improvements in memory, attention, mental agility, and problem-solving skills. The appeal is clear, says Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, but whether they have lasting general effects is not.
The fact that companies are marketing these training programs to customers before their value has been rigorously proved has caused some skepticism in the field, say experts. “The field is still growing,” says Suzanne Jaeggi, a neuropsychologist at the University of Maryland. While studies have shown that there are cognitive benefits to the training, it’s very hard to detect an impact on daily life, she says. However, some work, including research by her own group, has shown that working memory exercises can improve reading abilities in schoolchildren.
In the study conducted by Kesler and colleagues, the participants trained at home on Lumosity, a collection of gamelike cognitive exercises developed by Lumos Labs in San Francisco. (Lumos Labs did not fund the study.)
Kesler’s project is one of around two dozen efforts using Lumosity software to study human cognition. With 35 million customers worldwide, Lumosity is collecting what it says is the world’s largest database of human cognition, which could be queried for connections between lifestyle and cognitive ability. “Our technology collects a lot of data and makes it easy to run experiments to learn more generally about human cognitive performance,” says Mike Scanlon, cofounder of Lumos Labs. “We track all of the results from the cognitive testing and training, and we can combine that with demographic information to learn about how people’s cognitive performance changes and develops over the years.”
One such finding, he says, is a correlation between outside weather temperature and cognitive performance: “It turned out that the colder it is, the higher people’s performance is, even though generally they are inside doing this on a computer.”
Most of the scientific projects involving Lumosity’s software are exploring the effectiveness of brain training in different populations, from schoolchildren to stroke patients. For the study on breast cancer survivors, 41 women aged 40 and older, who were at least a year and half past their last chemotherapy treatment, were tested on several cognitive tasks at the beginning of the study. Then half the women used Lumosity training modules for 20 to 30 minutes four times a week for 12 weeks, and all were tested again.
When the investigators tested the participants in verbal memory, processing speed, and cognitive function, they found that the women who had used the brain training program improved in three of five objective measures.
“This is a well-done study—they had not just one transfer test but several,” says Hambrick, who notes that many studies of cognitive training depend on a single test to measure results. “But an issue is the lack of activity within the control group.” Better would be to have the control group do another demanding cognitive task in lieu of Lumosity training—something analogous to a placebo, he says: “The issue is that maybe the improvement in the group that did the cognitive training doesn’t reflect enhancement of basic cognitive processes per se, but could be a motivational phenomenon.”
Even if the effects are due to motivation or some other benefit not related to mental agility, that’s still useful, says Landau. “If [cognitive training] is something that makes people feel good and improves their confidence in their own skills, that’s not trivial at all,” she says. “That could be a big part of the effect that’s observed.”
(Source: technologyreview.com)
A little brain training goes a long way
People who use a ‘brain-workout’ program for just 10 hours have a mental edge over their peers even a year later, researchers report today in PLoS ONE.
The search for a regimen of mental callisthenics to stave off age-related cognitive decline is a booming area of research — and a multimillion-dollar business. But critics argue that even though such computer programs can improve performance on specific mental tasks, there is scant proof that they have broader cognitive benefits.
For the study, adults aged 50 and older played a computer game designed to boost the speed at which players process visual stimuli. Processing speed is thought to be “the first domino that falls in cognitive decline”, says Fredric Wolinsky, a public-health researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who led the research.
The game was developed by academic researchers but is now sold under the name Double Decision by Posit Science, based in San Francisco, California. (Posit did not fund the study.) Players are timed on how fast they click on an image in the centre of the screen and on others that appear around the periphery. The program ratchets up the difficulty as a player’s performance improves.
Participants played the training game for 10 hours on site, some with an extra 4-hour ‘booster’ session later, or for 10 hours at home. A control group worked on computerized crossword puzzles for 10 hours on site. Researchers measured the mental agility of all 621 subjects before the brain training began, and again one year later, using eight well-established tests of cognitive performance.
The control group’s scores did not increase over the course of that year, but all the brain-training groups significantly upped their scores in the Useful Field of View test — which requires a subject to identify items in a scene with just a quick glance — and four others. When they compared the study participants’ scores to those expected for people their ages, the researchers found improvements that translated to 3-4.1 years of protection in age-related decline for the field-of-view test and from 1.5-6.6 years for the other tasks.
“It was interesting that it didn’t matter whether you were on site at the clinic or just did this at home — you got basically the same bang for your buck,” says Frederick Unverzagt, a neuropsychologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, who was not involved with the study.
But Peter Snyder, a neuropsychologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, points out that players’ performance could have improved simply because they were familiar with the game — not because their cognitive skills improved. “To me, that makes it hard to interpret the results with the same degree of certainty” that the authors have, he says.
Snyder also doubts that 10 hours of training could affect brain wiring enough to provide long-lasting general benefits, but Henry Mahncke, chief executive of Posit Science, disagrees. “If you’ve never played piano before and spend 10 hours practising, a year later you will be better than when you started,” he says. “The new study shows that there’s science to be done here. Some things you can do with your brain are highly productive and others are not.”
With a little training, signs of schizophrenia are averted
August 22, 2012
Animals that literally have holes in their brains can go on to behave as normal adults if they’ve had the benefit of a little cognitive training in adolescence. That’s according to new work in the August 23 Neuron, a Cell Press publication, featuring an animal model of schizophrenia, where rats with particular neonatal brain injuries develop schizophrenia-like symptoms.
"The brain can be loaded with all sorts of problems," said André Fenton of New York University. "What this work shows is that experience can overcome those disabilities."
Fenton’s team made the discovery completely by accident. His team was interested in what Fenton considers a core problem in schizophrenia: the inability to sift through confusing or conflicting information and focus on what’s relevant.
"As you walk through the world, you might be focused on a phone conversation, but there are also kids in the park and cars and other distractions," he explained. "These information streams are all competing for our brain to process them. That’s a really challenging situation for someone with schizophrenia."
Fenton and his colleagues developed a laboratory test of cognitive control needed for that kind of focus. In the test, rats had to learn to avoid a foot shock while they were presented with conflicting information. Normal rats can manage that task quickly. Rats with brain lesions can also manage this task, but only up until they become young adults—the equivalent of an 18- or 20-year-old person—when signs of schizophrenia typically set in.
While that was good to see, Fenton says, it wasn’t really all that surprising. But then some unexpected circumstances in the lab led them to test animals with adolescent experience in the cognitive control test again, once they had grown into adults.
These rats should have shown cognitive control deficits, similar to those that had not received prior cognitive training, or so the researchers thought. Instead, they were just fine. Their schizophrenic symptoms had somehow been averted.
Fenton believes their early training for focus forged some critical neural connections, allowing the animals to compensate for the injury still present in their brains in adulthood. Not only were the animals’ behaviors normalized with training, but the patterns of activity in their brains were also.
The finding is consistent with the notion that mental disorders are the consequence of problems in brain development that might have gotten started years before. They raise the optimistic hope that the right kinds of experiences at the right time could change the future by enabling people to better manage their diseases and better function in society. Adolescence, when the brain undergoes significant change and maturation, might be a prime time for such training.
"You may have a damaged brain, but the consequences of that damage might be overcome without changing the damage itself," Fenton says. "You could target schizophrenia, but other disorders aren’t very different," take autism or depression, for example.
And really, in this world of infinite distraction, couldn’t we all use a little more cognitive control?
Source: medicalxpress.com