Online memorization and reasoning games help seniors improve their cognitive skills. Playing five times a week would give the best results.
This is news that should delight the “geeks” who lie dormant in us. Playing on a computer would have health benefits, and in particular would slow down the cognitive decline of seniors.
Obviously, it is not a question of making two hours of “Sims”, but of practicing games of memorization and reasoning online. For the purposes of the experiment, researchers from King’s College recruited nearly 7,000 adults over the age of fifty, in order to submit them to mental exercises, on a digital platform.
The participants were divided into two groups: on one side, the players, on the other, people who were instructed to do little research on the Internet. They were all followed for six months and could do ten-minute sessions, as many times as they wanted, on the computers.
Recognized cognitive tests
The results, published in the scientific journal JAMDA (The Journal of Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine), are formal. Regularly subjected to recognized cognitive tests during the study period, the players obtain higher scores than the other participants. In particular, the results are better in people who gambled five or more times per week.
For researchers, these games also have the potential to slow the development of Azheimer’s disease. In addition, participants over the age of sixty felt the benefits on a daily basis. They felt better able to do simple activities, such as cooking or shopping.
Playing would, on the other hand, have no effect on those under fifty. Longer-term studies will now be launched to study the link between online games and cognitive abilities.
.
