October 3, 2006 Source: :
http://dailynews.mcmaster.ca/story.cfm?id=4263 You can teach an old brain new
tricks Study shows that
seniors can learn to multi-task
by Jane Christmas
October 03, 2006 Can't walk and chew gum at the same time? Chances are you've got a problem
with multi-tasking, and that problem will likely get worse as you get older. The good news is that multi-tasking can be re-learned. Researchers at
McMaster University have found that seniors, who typically have more
difficulty than younger people dividing attention between two or more tasks
at a time, can overcome these difficulties with practice. In fact, with
practice, seniors can learn to do two tasks at the same time just as well as
they can do one of those tasks in isolation. The study was published today in the online edition of the international
journal Vision Research. "Our research essentially shows that you can teach an old brain new tricks,"
said Dr. Allison Sekuler, professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and
Behaviour and the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience. "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." Sekuler led the study along with McMaster professor
Patrick Bennett and postdoctoral fellow Eric Richards. The McMaster team tested their subjects on a variant of the Useful Field of
View task, originally developed by Sekuler's father, Professor Robert
Sekuler, and his students. In the task, people are 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 from Sekuler's and Bennett's lab showed that older
subjects suffered more from having to do both tasks at the same time than
did younger subjects. The current study, however, showed that the age-related disadvantage could
be removed by giving older subjects more time to do the task. The study also
showed 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 to get
to that level of learning than did younger subjects. And the benefits of
learning were long-lasting--older subjects performed just as well when they
were re-tested up to three months later as they had right after training. Jocelyn Faubert, 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 [divided attention] 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. McMaster University, a world-renowned, research-intensive university,
fosters a culture of innovation, and a commitment to discovery and learning
in teaching, research and scholarship. Based in Hamilton, the University,
one of only four Canadian universities to be listed on the Top 100
universities in the world, has a student population of more than 23,000, and
an alumni population of more than 120,000 in 128 countries.
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