Corrigendum: Brain training with non-action video games enhances aspects of cognition in older adults: a randomized controlled trial.

[This corrects the article on p. 277 in vol. 6, PMID: 25352805.].

A randomized controlled trial of brain training with non-action video games in older adults: results of the 3-month follow-up.

This randomized controlled study (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02007616) investigated the maintenance of training effects of 20 1-hr non-action video game training sessions with selected games from a commercial package on several age-declining cognitive functions and subjective wellbeing after a 3-month no-contact period. Two groups of cognitively normal older adults participated in both the post-training (posttest) and the present follow-up study, the experimental group who received training and the control group who attended several meetings with the research team during the study but did not receive training. Groups were similar at baseline on demographics, vocabulary, global cognition, and depression status. Significant improvements in the trained group, and no variation in the control group had been previously found at posttest, in processing speed, attention and visual recognition memory, as well as in two dimensions of subjective wellbeing. In the current study, improvement from baseline to 3 months follow-up was found only in wellbeing (Affection and Assertivity dimensions) in the trained group whereas there was no change in the control group. Previous significant improvements in processing speed, attention and spatial memory become non-significant after the 3-month interval. Training older adults with non-action video games enhanced aspects of cognition just after training but this effect disappeared after a 3-month no-contact follow-up period. Cognitive plasticity can be induced in older adults by training, but to maintain the benefits periodic boosting sessions would be necessary.

Brain training with non-action video games enhances aspects of cognition in older adults: a randomized controlled trial.

Age-related cognitive and brain declines can result in functional deterioration in many cognitive domains, dependency, and dementia. A major goal of aging research is to investigate methods that help to maintain brain health, cognition, independent living and wellbeing in older adults. This randomized controlled study investigated the effects of 20 1-h non-action video game training sessions with games selected from a commercially available package (Lumosity) on a series of age-declined cognitive functions and subjective wellbeing. Two groups of healthy older adults participated in the study, the experimental group who received the training and the control group who attended three meetings with the research team along the study. Groups were similar at baseline on demographics, vocabulary, global cognition, and depression status. All participants were assessed individually before and after the intervention, or a similar period of time, using neuropsychological tests and laboratory tasks to investigate possible transfer effects. The results showed significant improvements in the trained group, and no variation in the control group, in processing speed (choice reaction time), attention (reduction of distraction and increase of alertness), immediate and delayed visual recognition memory, as well as a trend to improve in Affection and Assertivity, two dimensions of the Wellbeing Scale. Visuospatial working memory (WM) and executive control (shifting strategy) did not improve. Overall, the current results support the idea that training healthy older adults with non-action video games will enhance some cognitive abilities but not others.

The ELF@Home project: Elderly sELF-care based on sELF-check of health conditions and sELF-fitness at home.

The ELF@Home project is a research and innovation project running from June 1st 2013 to May 31st 2016 and co-funded by the Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme (AAL JP) and National Authorities in Spain, Sweden and Germany. The ELF@Home project relies on the use of the proven advantages of elderly fitness to develop a self-care solution based on self-check of health conditions and self-fitness at home. The project uses information and communication technologies (ICT) to build an autonomous fitness system targeting healthy or pre-frail elderly people aged over 65 and living independently at home.

Tools, perspectives and avatars in blended reality space.

Blended Reality Space is our term for an interactive mixed-reality environment where the physical and the virtual are intimately combined in the service of interaction goals and communication environments aimed at health support and rehabilitation. The present study examines the effect on rated presence and self-presence of three key factors in the way blended realities may be implemented for these purposes. Our findings emphasize the importance of tangibility for presence, but suggest that presence and self-presence are unrelated phenomena. These findings will be incorporated into design principles for our planned work to develop free movement-based interactions for motor rehabilitation as well as blended-reality spaces for collaboration between hospitals, care organizations, and the home.

The layers of presence: a bio-cultural approach to understanding presence in natural and mediated environments.

This paper proposes a bio-cultural theory of presence based on four different positions related to the role and structure of presence, as follows. First, presence is a defining feature of self and it is related to the evolution of a key feature of any central nervous system: the embedding of sensory-referred properties into an internal functional space. Without the emergence of the sense of presence it is impossible for the nervous system to experience distal attribution: the referencing of our perception to an external space beyond the limits of the sensory organs themselves. Second, even if the experience of the sense of presence is a unitary feeling, conceptually it can be divided in three different layers, phylogenetically different and strictly related to the three levels of self identified by Damasio. In particular we can make conceptual distinctions between proto presence (self vs. non self), core presence (self vs. present external world), and extended presence (self relative to present external world). Third, given that each layer of presence solves a particular facet of the internal/external world separation, it is characterized by specific properties. Finally, in humans the sense of presence is a direct function of these three layers: the more they are integrated, the more we are present. In the experience of optimal presence, biologically and culturally determined cognitive processes are working in harmony--to focus all levels of the self on a significant situation in the external world, whether this is real or virtual.

Dextrous and shared interaction with medical data: stereoscopic vision is more important than hand-image collocation.

The current experiment was carried out to extend our knowledge about the relative importance of stereoscopic display and hand-image collocation for dextrous interaction. We devised a new task, the Volumetric Dexterity Test (VDT), which quite accurately duplicates the way professional personnel such as surgeons and radiologists interact with detailed medical data in a VR environment. Our results were surprising. Stereo vision was very important to both accuracy and speed of task completion, as we found previously. But the presence of hand-image collocation did not improve accuracy, despite the fact that this was a truly three-dimensional task. If this finding is borne out it has important implications for the volumetric presentation of medical data to individual practitioners and in group settings.