Brain Training

Elizabeth Zelinski of the University of Southern California reports on the old-fashioned way of doing brain training (i.e. before FPS training :-) ) in a large scale RCT with some nice methodological touches. The training program seems to be based on auditory and mouse exercises. Here's the poster that was presented at Gerontological Society Meetings in San Francisco last weekend.

The generalization of training is an interesting finding, similar to FPS training results. If we use video games to do something similar with seniors we should think about comparing our results to this rather different, but seemingly effective, approach to brain training.

Zelinski and her colleagues used Brain Fitness 2.0 from Posit Science (a commercial brain training site) and the study was funded by the same company (conflict of interest here?).

Newsweek has a feature on the study.