Developing and testing a neurotherapeutic treatment to improve spatiotemporal cognition in seniors

There are currently around million seniors in the US with over million expected by Seniors are living longer often alone and many continue to drive into their s But these positive developments do increase the high risk of these seniors being in a motor vehicle accident or suffering a dangerous fall This huge and costly public health concern could be reduced significantly low cost engaging self administered treatments for seniors There has been a recent surge in computer based diagnostic and training tools aimed at reducing cognitive impairment in seniors However there are no known treatments for increased crowding in mental representations of spatial and temporal information Crowding greatly impairs in seniorsandapos the very cognitive processes that are extremely important for safe driving and locomotion Crowding happens when information usually coming from vision is mentally represented in a personandapos s mind with much less detail than is present in the real world A useful analogy is the difference in trying to make accurate measurements or size comparisons between objects in the pictures taken by a low resolution and a high resolution digital camera Crowding will be worse in seniors because it is related to visual acuity and how widely attention can be spread across the viewerandapos s visual field Both of these decline in healthy aging We propose to develop novel treatments combining clinical science with evidence showing that playing action video games significantly improves the very cognitive processes that determine how much crowding in spatial and temporal information a person experiences We will not use off the shelf games because they are not targeted specifically at improving spatial and temporal cognition and because they usually contain themes and storylines unpalatable to seniors Instead we will develop specialized games These will be created so that all of difficulty adjustments the games make are targeted specifically at improving the spatial and temporal abilities that will reduce crowding The games will also have themes storylines and difficulty levels developed specifically for seniors with their input This is because a treatment can only work if it is being used and at an effective dosage regimen So our treatments will be played and enjoyed like real games and will not feel like therapy or work We proposed to develop a full treatment game with evidence of therapeutic efficacy by building upon our existing prototypes We will test versions of the game during its development with a group of healthy seniors and will survey up to seniors about the kinds of game content and storylines that they would find enjoyable We will provide seniors with the final version of the treatment game without any play requirements and monitor their usage patterns for a month to see if there is sufficient self motivated and self administered treatment If not we use feedback to subsequently re design aspects of the game in order to create that compliance We will also conduct a small informal trial with seniors that will compare the effects on crowding of hours of treatment with our therapeutic game to hours playing Tetris Narrative Over million older Americans are at increased risk for potentially fatal motor vehicle accidents and falls We propose to reduce that risk improving their spatial and temporal information processing abilities We will create novel treatments in the form of specially designed age appropriate video games targeting the critical but almost completely unaddressed problem of increased spatiotemporal crowding that impairs seniorsandapos cognitive processes