October 4, 2006 Source: :
http://www.upei.ca/cgi-new/view.cgi?id=3187 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 - 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 – 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. Contact Name: Anne McCallum Department: Media Relations and Communications
Phone: 902-566-0760 Email: aemccallum@upei.ca
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