Older adults who play digital puzzle games have the same memory abilities as people in their 20s, a new study has shown.
The study, from the University of York, also found that adults aged 60 and over who play digital puzzle games had a greater ability to ignore irrelevant distractions, but older adults who played strategy games did not show the same improvements in memory or concentration.
It is known that as humans age, their mental abilities tend to decrease, particularly the ability to remember a number of things at a single time — known as working memory. Working memory is thought to peak between the ages of 20 and 30 before slowly declining as a person gets older.
Previous research, however, has shown that the way we hold information in the brain changes as we get older, and so the York team looked at whether the impacts of particular types of mental stimulation, such as…
