Playing puzzles on your smartphone in older age could give you the short-term memory of someone in their twenties, study finds
- Experts believe puzzles boost memory because they encourage focus
Playing a puzzle on your smartphone in older age could give you the short-term memory of someone in their twenties, a study suggests.
Researchers analysed 181 individuals aged between 60 and 81 who were asked about the digital games they played, alongside 209 people aged 18 to 30.
Popular puzzles included crosswords, online quizzes and sudoku, similar to those available on The Mail+ app.
The participants were asked to complete a test of their working memory – the ability to remember things such as shopping lists or telephone numbers for a short period of time – which starts to decline in later life.
Older people who said they played puzzles online performed almost as well in the test as the people aged between 18 to 30 who did not play digital games.
(Stock Photo) Popular puzzles included crosswords, online quizzes and sudoku, similar to those available on The Mail+ app
(Stock Photo) Experts believe a reason behind puzzles boosting memory is that they encourage focus and help people ignore distractions
Dr. Fiona McNab, who led the study from the University of York, said: ‘We think these results are really encouraging.
‘The older people who reported playing puzzle games had equivalent working memory scores to the younger adults who reported playing no games.
‘This may be because people can preserve their working memory in older age by playing puzzle games.
‘But it also might be, for example, that older adults with better working memory are more likely to choose to play puzzle games, so more research is needed.’
Among the 390 participants, 141 said they played zero digital games a week.
The rest were sorted into three categories based on whether the games they played were mostly puzzles, strategy games, such as online bridge and solitaire, or mainly action video games, which were most popular among the younger group.
To test people’s short-term memories, researchers showed volunteers a number of red circles in boxes within a grid, which appeared for one second and then vanished.
The volunteers had to remember the positions of the red circles, sometimes ignoring distracting yellow circles, while the number of red circles they were shown increased.
On average, younger people who played no digital games could remember the position of eight red circles in their brain, while the older group managed just over six.
This was expected as working memory tends to decline as people get older.
But older people who played online puzzle games remembered almost seven red circles, meaning their memory was not significantly different to some people old enough to be their children or grandchildren.
Even younger people who played online puzzle games did not have significantly better memories than older people who played them.
Experts believe a reason behind puzzles boosting memory is that they encourage focus and help people ignore distractions.
That is useful when trying to remember something important, like a list of groceries, without getting sidetracked.
Older people who did puzzles were less likely to get distracted by yellow circles in the same grid as the red circles they needed to remember, based on their scores in this task.
Older people in the study played around ten hours of digital puzzles a week, while younger people played around five hours.
But this was not linked to the results as older people also spent more time playing strategy games, but did not have better memory scores linked to these games.
Younger people had significantly better memory scores on average if they played strategy games rather than action games.
It may be that the strategy games played by older people are not as difficult as the games played by younger people.
The researchers say future studies could focus on why there is a difference between impacts of types of games depending on the age of a player, and if this is connected to how the brain stores information as people age.
The study was published in the journal Heliyon.
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