Study Shows Practice Can Help Old Brains Learn New Tricks

A new study led by Dr. Eric Richards of the UPEI Department of Psychology is challenging some of our stereotypes about the capacity of older people to change. His research team has found that although our ability to carry out several activities at the same may diminish with age, multi-tasking can actually be re-learned through practice. The findings were published this week in the online edition of the international journal, Vision Research.

"Our research shows that practice can help older brains learn new tricks," says Professor Richards who worked on the study when he was a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University in Hamilton. His colleagues were Dr. Allison Sekuler, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience, and Dr. Patrick Bennett, Canada Research Chairs in Vision Science.

The researchers tested their subjects on a variant of the Useful Field of View task. They were asked to identify a letter flashed quickly in the middle of a computer screen, to localize the position of a spot flashed quickly in the periphery, or to do both tasks at the same time. Previous research had shown that older subjects suffered more from having to do both tasks at the same time than did younger subjects. The current study shows that the age-related disadvantage can be removed by giving older subjects more time to do the task.

The study also indicated that, over the course of about two weeks of training, both younger and older subjects learned to multi-task as well as they could perform a single task, although older subjects seemed to require more practice. The benefits of learning were long-lasting and#9472; older subjects performed just as well when they were re-tested up to three months later as they had right after training.

"Before training, our participants had a much harder time multi-tasking than performing one of our tasks on its own. After training, both younger and older participants were able to perform both tasks simultaneously, with no cost in performance," says Dr. Allison Sekuler.

Jocelyn Faubert, a professor on vision and aging at the Universite de Montreal, and NSERC-Essilor chair on presbyopia and visual perception, says the study is an important one in demonstrating that the elderly can regain youthful capacities.

"They show that training on a task where more than a single element must be processed and#150; divided attention and#150; can improve the performance of the elderly to levels comparable to young adults," says Faubert. "This is particularly important for naturalistic tasks where the need to simultaneously attend to multiple elements is commonplace, such as when someone is moving through crowds in a shopping mall or driving. This generates much hope for systematic interventions in the elderly population in an attempt to increase their quality of life."

The research was funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the Canada Research Chair program.