“We got the whole story this time,” Dr. Gazzaley told me, sounding rather triumphant, when I reached him on the phone in mid-August as he was going through final edits of the article. “We demonstrated transfer from the training to other types of cognitive abilities and showed that the multitasking improvements on the game were sustainable.” He felt especially chuffed that older adults who participated in a version of the game that required multitasking were also the ones who demonstrated heightened ability in fighting distraction and sustaining their attention.

In an email several days later, he summed up the significance of this breakthrough: “What we have here is a link between neural plasticity and behavioral plasticity, pointing to a neural basis of transfer effects…Transfer has become the holy grail for training studies, but it is not a magic trick. Our data suggest that there must be a common neural mechanism of cognitive control that underlies working memory, sustained attention and multitasking and we put pressure on it with our game.”

This was a point fleshed out by the lead author of the study, Joaquin Anguera. “Many groups have found transfer to other abilities, other groups have shown neural changes following training, but we are the first to show both – and that they are correlated with each other,” he said. “That’s something no other cognitive training study has previously shown, ever – hey, with video game training!” The next step, he said, would be refining NeuroRacer, fleshing out the role of the prefrontal cortex, and devising interventions that even more effectively reverse the “costs” of distraction for older adults. If they can succeed in these goals, the implications for helping people navigate the disruptiveness of modern life would be immense.

Backdrop

The current study builds on earlier research by Gazzaley, a physician and neurologist at the Mission Bay campus of UCSF. He trained originally in an MD/PhD program at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, focussed on the patterns of cognitive decline in aged monkeys. Unlike humans, monkeys suffer from memory loss as they age but don’t contract Alzheimer’s Disease, and that set him on the search for solutions to commonly-experienced cognitive slippage. When he moved to a medical residency in clinical neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, Gazzaley regularly conducted extensive histories on aging patients, exploring the common but often quite troubling lapses in cognition related to so-called “normal aging.” He routinely asked his patients, “Have you noticed any change in your thinking abilities?” and used the responses to shape his research goals.

In a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Mark D’Esposito, a renowned expert on working memory at U.C. Berkeley, Gazzaley was perhaps best known as part of the team which identified separate neural markers for focusing attention and filtering out distraction – two functions once thought of as an indivisible thing. “Not two sides of the same coin, but different coins,” the neuroscientist said, in describing this breakthrough. Followup work detailed the connection between paying attention and simultaneously warding off interruptions. The current study builds on this earlier finding, which launched Gazzaley on his quest to identify the underlying neural mechanisms controlling what we remember and how we forget.