The notion that cognitive and motor skills are plastic and can be improved with training is very exciting, because it opens up the possibility for rehabilitation and amelioration of age-related declines in performance. It has been shown that older adults can improve cognitive processes such as attentional control, memory, and speed of processing with training. Although transfer to other tasks has been reported, it is not clear whether benefits transfer to real-world tasks such as driving. The aging of the baby boomers will bring about new challenges for the safety of older drivers. In the current study, we evaluated whether a five week cognitive training intervention resulted in improvements in measures of cognition, complex motor control, and performance in a driving simulator task for both young and older adults. Young and older adults were assigned to the cognitive training intervention group (young n=29, older adult n =18) and to a knowledge training (vocabulary and trivia) control group (young n = 27, older adult n=18). We have completed enrollment and testing of young adults at this time; enrollment and testing for the older adults is ongoing. Both training groups exhibited improvement on the cognitive training protocol across five weeks of practice. Significant transfer effects were observed for other measures of working memory and processing speed. Although the results for older adults are preliminary as participants are still completing the intervention, they show transfer to the complex motor tasks and the driving simulator measures, particularly under dual task conditions. These results suggest that working memory training may be a useful intervention to improve driving in older adults, but has minimal impact in relatively high functioning young adults. (Author/publisher) The full text of this document may be found at: http://m-castl.org/node/50
Abstract