This study was completed partial fulfillment of the requirements for my degree of Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from New College of Florida. In this study, I investigated whether training on a video game would affect older adults’ performance on a visual test. Older adult participants who completed the study showed a significant improvement in their performance on the visual test between pre- and post-testing. Continue reading for more details.
Study Design
Recent research has suggested that playing video games can affect performance on visual and cognitive tests. However, much of this research has been done with college-aged participants. I wanted to investigate these effects in older adults due to natural change in vision and cognition that occur with aging.
I decided to use the UFOV as the measure of visual cognition because of past research showing a relationship between UFOV and driving ability in older adults.
I also wanted to investigate multiple types of games. I used a racing game, TrackMania Nations Forever, because much of the previous research had used racing or shooter games. I also used a puzzle game, Zuma (pictured left), because The particular puzzle game was selected because of similarities between it and the UFOV test (pictured below).
Experiment
Participants were assigned to one of three groups: control, puzzle game, or racing game. All participants took the UFOV test (pictured below) at the start of the study, and again 3 weeks later.
The two game groups played the assigned video game for 15 hours over the 3 week period. The control group did not play a game, and was included to compare any changes in UFOV performance between groups.
Both older and younger adults were recruited to investigate possible differences in performance across age.
Outcome
Two older adults successfully completed the training portion of the study. Both participants were in the puzzle group. One racing group participant completed roughly half of the training portion.
Both participants in the puzzle group improved their UFOV performance significantly (pictured below; lower score is faster performance).
These results were promising. However, due to the small sample size of the study, I decided not to seek publication.
Mak Pryor 