̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - brain training

Boost your life in 2025: Top tips for a healthier body and mind from Cambridge experts

jg533 — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:16:07 +0000

Five Cambridge experts share their top tips on ways to boost your body and mind, backed up by their own research

Brain training app improves users’ concentration, study shows

cjb250 — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 09:00:47 +0000

A team from the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has developed and tested ‘Decoder’, a new game that is aimed at helping users improve their attention and concentration. ̽��ֱ��game is based on the team’s own research and has been evaluated scientifically.

‘Brain training’ app found to improve memory in people with mild cognitive impairment

cjb250 — Sun, 02 Jul 2017 23:05:01 +0000

Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) has been described as the transitional stage between ‘healthy ageing’ and dementia. It is characterised by day-to-day memory difficulties and problems of motivation. At present, there are no approved drug treatments for the cognitive impairments of patients affected by the condition.

Cognitive training has shown some benefits, such as speed of attentional processing, for patients with aMCI, but training packages are typically repetitive and boring, affecting patients’ motivation. To overcome this problem, researchers from the Departments of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences and the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge developed ‘Game Show’, a memory game app, in collaboration with patients with aMCI, and tested its effects on cognition and motivation.

̽��ֱ��researchers randomly assigned forty-two patients with amnestic MCI to either the cognitive training or control group. Participants in the cognitive training group played the memory game for a total of eight one-hour sessions over a four-week period; participants in the control group continued their clinic visits as usual.

In the game, which participants played on an iPad, the player takes part in a game show to win gold coins. In each round, they are challenged to associate different geometric patterns with different locations. Each correct answer allows the player to earn more coins. Rounds continue until completion or after six incorrect attempts are made. ̽��ֱ��better the player gets, the higher the number of geometric patterns presented – this helps tailor the difficulty of the game to the individual’s performance to keep them motivated and engaged. A game show host encourages the player to maintain and progress beyond their last played level.

Screenshot from Game Show. Credit: Sahakian Lab

̽��ֱ��results showed that patients who played the game made around a third fewer errors, needed fewer trials and improved their memory score by around 40%, showing that they had correctly remembered the locations of more information at the first attempt on a test of episodic memory. Episodic memory is important for day-to-day activities and is used, for example, when remembering where we left our keys in the house or where we parked our car in a multi-story car park. Compared to the control group, the cognitive training group also retained more complex visual information after training.

In addition, participants in the cognitive training group indicated that they enjoyed playing the game and were motivated to continue playing across the eight hours of cognitive training. Their confidence and subjective memory also increased with gameplay. ̽��ֱ��researchers say that this demonstrates that games can help maximise engagement with cognitive training.

“Good brain health is as important as good physical health. There's increasing evidence that brain training can be beneficial for boosting cognition and brain health, but it needs to be based on sound research and developed with patients,” says Professor Barbara Sahakian, co-inventor of the game: “It also need to be enjoyable enough to motivate users to keep to their programmes. Our game allowed us to individualise a patient’s cognitive training programme and make it fun and enjoyable for them to use.”

Dr George Savulich, the lead scientist on the study, adds: “Patients found the game interesting and engaging and felt motivated to keep training throughout the eight hours. We hope to extend these findings in future studies of healthy ageing and mild Alzheimer’s disease.”

̽��ֱ��researchers hope to follow this published study up with a future large-scale study and to determine how long the cognitive improvements persist.

̽��ֱ��design of ‘Game Show’ was based on published research from the Sahakian Laboratory at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��study was funded by Janssen Pharmaceuticals/J&J and Wellcome.

In 2015, Professor Sahakian and colleagues showed that another iPad game developed by her team was effective at improving the memory of patients with schizophrenia, helping them in their daily lives at work and living independently. ̽��ֱ��Wizard memory game is available through PEAK via the App Store and Google Play.

Reference
George Savulich, Thomas Piercy, Chris Fox, John Suckling, James Rowe, John O'Brien, Barbara Sahakian. Cognitive training using a novel memory game on an iPad in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). ̽��ֱ��International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology; 3 July 2017; DOI: 10.1093/ijnp/pyx040

A ‘brain training’ game developed by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge could help improve the memory of patients in the very earliest stages of dementia, suggests a study published today in ̽��ֱ��International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology.

There's increasing evidence that brain training can be beneficial for boosting cognition and brain health, but it needs to be based on sound research

Barbara Sahakian

Sahakian Lab

Screenshot of Game Show

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

‘Brain training’ app may improve memory and daily functioning in schizophrenia

cjb250 — Sun, 02 Aug 2015 23:01:11 +0000

Schizophrenia is a long-term mental health condition that causes a range of psychological symptoms, ranging from changes in behaviour through to hallucinations and delusions. Psychotic symptoms are reasonably well treated by current medications; however, patients are still left with debilitating cognitive impairments, including in their memory, and so are frequently unable to return to university or work.

There are as yet no licensed pharmaceutical treatments to improve cognitive functions for people with schizophrenia. However, there is increasing evidence that computer-assisted training and rehabilitation can help people with schizophrenia overcome some of their symptoms, with better outcomes in daily functioning and their lives.

Schizophrenia is estimated to cost £13.1 billion per year in total in the UK, so even small improvements in cognitive functions could help patients make the transition to independent living and working and could therefore substantially reduce direct and indirect costs, besides improving the wellbeing and health of patients.

In a study published today in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, a team of researchers led by Professor Barbara Sahakian from the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge describe how they developed and tested Wizard, an iPad game aimed at improving an individual’s episodic memory. Episodic memory is the type of memory required when you have to remember where you parked your car in a multi-storey car park after going shopping for several hours or where you left your keys in home several hours ago, for example. It is one of the facets of cognitive functioning to be affected in patients with schizophrenia.

̽��ֱ��game, Wizard, was the result of a nine-month collaboration between psychologists, neuroscientists, a professional game-developer and people with schizophrenia. It was intended to be fun, attention-grabbing, motivating and easy to understand, whilst at the same time improving the player’s episodic memory. ̽��ֱ��memory task was woven into a narrative in which the player was allowed to choose their own character and name; the game rewarded progress with additional in-game activities to provide the user with a sense of progression independent of the cognitive training process.

̽��ֱ��researchers assigned twenty-two participants, who had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, to either the cognitive training group or a control group at random. Participants in the training group played the memory game for a total of eight hours over a four-week period; participants in the control group continued their treatment as usual. At the end of the four weeks, the researchers tested all participants’ episodic memory using the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) PAL, as well as their level of enjoyment and motivation, and their score on the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scale, which doctors use to rate the social, occupational, and psychological functioning of adults.

Professor Sahakian and colleagues found that the patients who had played the memory game made significantly fewer errors and needed significantly fewer attempts to remember the location of different patterns in the CANTAB PAL test relative to the control group. In addition, patients in the cognitive training group saw an increase in their score on the GAF scale.

Participants in the cognitive training group indicated that they enjoyed the game and were motivated to continue playing across the eight hours of cognitive training. In fact, the researchers found that those who were most motivated also performed best at the game. This is important, as lack of motivation is another common facet of schizophrenia.

Professor Sahakian says: “We need a way of treating the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as problems with episodic memory, but slow progress is being made towards developing a drug treatment. So this proof-of-concept study is important because it demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have so far failed. Because the game is interesting, even those patients with a general lack of motivation are spurred on to continue the training.”

Professor Peter Jones adds: “These are promising results and suggest that there may be the potential to use game apps to not only improve a patient’s episodic memory, but also their functioning in activities of daily living. We will need to carry out further studies with larger sample sizes to confirm the current findings, but we hope that, used in conjunction with medication and current psychological therapies, this could help people with schizophrenia minimise the impact of their illness on everyday life.”

It is not clear exactly how the apps also improved the patients’ daily functioning, but the researchers suggest it may be because improvements in memory had a direct impact on global functions or that the cognitive training may have had an indirect impact on functionality by improving general motivation and restoring self-esteem. Or indeed, both these explanations may have played a role in terms of the impact of training on functional outcome.

In April 2015, Professor Sahakian and colleagues began a collaboration with the team behind the popular brain training app Peak to produce scientifically-tested cognitive training modules. ̽��ֱ��collaboration has resulted in the launch today of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� & Peak Advanced Training Plan a memory game, available within Peak’s iOS app, designed to train visual and episodic memory while promoting learning.

̽��ֱ��training module is based on the Wizard memory game, developed by Professor Sahakian and colleague Tom Piercy at the Department of Psychiatry at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Rights to the Wizard game were licensed to Peak by Cambridge Enterprise, the ̽��ֱ��’s commercialisation company.

“This new app will allow the Wizard memory game to become widely available, inexpensively. State-of-the-art neuroscience at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, combined with the innovative approach at Peak, will help bring the games industry to a new level and promote the benefits of cognitive enhancement,” says Professor Sahakian.

Reference
Sahakian, BJ et al. ̽��ֱ��impact of neuroscience on society: Cognitive enhancement in neuropsychiatric disorders and in healthy people. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B; 3 Aug 2015

Home page image: Brain Power by Allan Ajifo

A ‘brain training’ iPad game developed and tested by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge may improve the memory of patients with schizophrenia, helping them in their daily lives at work and living independently, according to research published today.

This proof-of-concept study is important because it demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have so far failed

Barbara Sahakian

Peak

Cambridge Advanced Training Programme

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes