THE ESSENTIAL
- Several studies have shown that musicians tend to have better short-term memory than non-musicians when it comes to music-related tasks, such as memorizing musical sequences.
- It’s less clear whether these benefits carry over to non-musical tasks or to non-musicians learning to play an instrument, and how these changes might actually be seen in the brain.
The ability to remember and recognize faces tends to decline with age. However, researchers may have found a solution to prevent this phenomenon, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
After a decade of work, scientists at the University of San Francisco’s Neuroscape Center have developed several types of video games that help improve a set of important cognitive abilities in aging adults, including short-term memory. The latest is a musical rhythm game, developed in consultation with drummer Mickey Hart, which not only taught the 47 participants aged 60 to 79 how to drum, but also improved their ability to remember faces. .
Memory: ability to remember faces is improved
For eight weeks, the game’s program used visual cues to teach participants how to play a rhythm on an electronic tablet. The algorithm has tailored the degree of difficulty – including tempo, complexity and level of precision required – to each player’s ability. Over time, the cues disappeared, requiring players to memorize the rhythm pattern.
At the start and end of the eight weeks, the participants took a short-term memory test to measure their ability to remember a face they had seen seconds before. Only the group that played the rhythm training game showed an improvement from their initial scores – by around 4%. Electroencephalography data showed greater activity in the right upper parietal lobe (a part of the brain) which is involved in both music reading and visual short-term memory for other tasks.
“This memory improvement was amazing”said neurology professor Theodore Zanto, director of Neuroscape’s Neuroscience Division, in a statement. This suggests, he says, that rhythm training improves the brain’s ability to focus its attention on a task to prepare it to convert the action into a memory.
Musicians tend to have better short-term memory
Professor Zanto hopes that extending the training period beyond eight weeks may lead to a stronger effect on memory recall. However, the effect demonstrated in this study still needs to be confirmed by real-world facial recognition scenarios as well as in laboratory tests to be fully convincing.
This is not Neuroscape’s first discovery about video games and memory. Last year, they had already signed another study in Scientific Reports on a virtual reality space navigation game, called “Labyrinth”, which improved long-term memory in elderly people after four weeks of training.