My daughter linked this finding to me last night: World of Warcraft Improves Cognitive Ability for Older Adults.  I couldn’t reconstruct the original link, but google pulled up an aggregated feed of a lot of places reporting on this result:

http://newsfeedresearcher.com/data/articles_m9/game-study-cognitive.html

The source lab looks to be doing some interesting stuff: http://www.gainsthroughgaming.org/index.html

The published report isn’t quite officially out yet (I think this link goes to a corrected proof): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563212000143

Some things to note — participants were 60-77 years old, played 14 hours of game play and only the lowest scoring participants exhibited reliable gains.  (Bonus statistical question — why would this raise some concerns about the reliability of the result?).  Looks like you can get a lot of media attention even for not quite totally awesome data in this area.  It’s probably deserved since it’s probably a real effect.  I suspect you’d want a bit more time in-game to see something more robust and I don’t see a real measure of “processing speed” in their assessments.

One additional thing to note — this is actually a hard study to pull off.  Getting ~40 adults in this age range to play WoW for a decent chunk of hours reflects a significant amount of work just in logistics and recruiting.  I think these gaming studies look easy from the outside, but when you try to run a training study of course you realize it’s not.

Kati sent a link to a piece in the New Yorker on Anti-Aging games: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2012/01/30/120130ta_talk_seabrook

Fountain of Youth Dept.
Re-Start
by John Seabrook January 30, 2012

Nolan Bushnell stopped by the office the other day, to play an anti-aging video game. “It’s what I call a ‘looking forward by looking backward’ game,” he said, settling in at the keyboard and loosening up his shoulders. “Meaning that you have to be able to solve a problem using information you received before you were distracted by something else. That’s why older people lose their cars in parking lots. They park, then they go in and shop—that’s the distraction—and then they can’t remember where they put their car.”

Here’s an interesting NY Times Opinion piece on some bill going forward that would stop NIH from requiring grantees to provide copies of their papers.

Tax dollars funding our research is especially touchy in the given economy, so it seems like this would be another bit of negative news to the researchers just wanting to do their jobs.

An email from my friend Jon Simons at Cambridge:

Please excuse the spam, but I’d be very grateful if people would be kind enough to spread the word to their students and colleagues about an online memory experiment we’ve launched this week in collaboration with the Guardian newspaper.  We’re hoping that thousands of people from all over the world will take part.

See press release: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/test-your-memory/

You can test your memory at the Guardian experiment website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/memorystudy

Thanks so much!

Best wishes,
Jon Simons.

I haven’t clicked the links to see what this is about, but in principle I like the idea of large N studies on memory collected online and given who it is from, it’s likely scientifically sensible.

That’s the advice from a blogger/writer who has been studying and writing about how to achieve excellence.  It’s mainly advice passed on from an expert piano player, but it has a certain intuitive appeal to it.

http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/12/23/flow-is-the-opiate-of-the-medicore-advice-on-getting-better-from-an-accomplished-piano-player/

I think the idea comes from the perspective of “deliberate practice” and the idea that practicing that which is too easy (and therefore you experience a flow state during practice) does not lead to improvement.

Can we reconcile this with our idea that practice should maximize dopamine release by successfully overcoming challenges?  I have described that idea previously as training so that you have as much success as possible while also realistically expecting that you might fail.

Perhaps we’d say that the flow state described by the pianist reflects a state of euphoria associated with performing so successfully that you cannot fail?  That would separate the idea of a “flow state” from our idea of dopamine reward release — which is just a rough hypothesis anyway.  Or perhaps the experience of the truly skilled expert is that they need to be challenged with more difficult training tasks to hit the maximal training reward level.  That would account for the pianist’s experience seeing the “mediocre” practicing things that seem too easy as just reflecting the fact that they are less skilled and simpler training tasks are optimal for them.  I wonder if anybody at the Music School here would have any insight on this kind of phenomenon.

In theory, we could test this with the SISL task by comparing sequence learning in conditions where we set the task speed to adaptively keep people at 75% correct or at ~100% correct (then test them under identical conditions).

This is cool, but I have to say I’m also a little sad that I didn’t write this…

How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/01/how-a-computer-game-is-reinventing-the-science-of-expertise-video/

There’s also some discussion of Starcraft as brain training to boot.

These guys are building the social networking/gaming environment that would be idea for embedding cognitive training

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/11/glitch-the-battle-to-build-a-massive-multiplayer-game-without-combat.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Tuning the quests and interactions to provide the right level of difficulty and reward was complicated. In beta testing, the development team found that while singing to butterflies was repetitive and boring, people would still sing to butterflies obsessively—because it provided small but guaranteed amounts of experience. The devs tried to balance this by making singing to animals cost energy, but then players simply farmed huge numbers of girly drinks (which made animals interactions cost no energy) and continued to grind the same thing again and again. The girly drinks were then nerfed, and people immediately complained.

“We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring,” Butterfield told me, “people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us.”

Just make the grindy things (singing to butterflies) training for WM, attention, executive control, etc.  We can put up with being secretly hated if we are covertly improving their brains.

An interesting article came out on the TIME website today, haven’t looked at the actual paper, but seems like a good read.

Study: Autistic Children Have More Brain Cells

This seems like a pretty interesting bit of research that suggests that stem cells might actually be applicable to treatment at some point.

Dopamine neurons derived from human ES cells efficiently engraft in animal models of Parkinson’s disease

The real question is, will this eventually destroy potential funding or need for Parkinson’s research? It’s funny to think that a large line of research may someday be moot.

A new paradigm for studying expertise?  Osu! is a free rhythm game that uses the mouse instead of the keyboard.  It’s pretty hard, but some people get pretty good at it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=mCAE6nzB6LI#t=526s

The game itself is available here: http://osu.ppy.sh/

It has potential value for introspection during skill learning, I think.  If you practice a specific “map” until you beat it, you’ll definitely notice that you’re getting better via skill learning.  But there is also a powerful sense of familiarity — you definitely feel like you recognize the sequence as you repeat it.  The memory system theory question is: is that conscious memory contributing to learning or is it epiphenomenal?

P.S. It’s mildly tricky to get running.  You have to download and install the executable, create an account on their site, then you can browse and download specific maps to try to play.  Also fair warning: much of the music is horrible.