From the article: A new study found promising results for a combined physical fitness and cognitive intervention designed to enhance neuroplasticity in older adults. Using a motion-capture video game, the intervention appeared to remediate age-related declines in attention. The findings were published in the journal npj Aging.

With age, cognitive abilities naturally decline. But there is some evidence that this decline can be slowed with training. For example, cognitive interventions that leverage neuroplasticity have shown potential in improving the cognitive abilities of older adults. Additionally, physical fitness interventions have been found to improve older adults’ cognitive abilities as well as their physical health. This pattern of findings suggests that an intervention that combines both cognition and fitness may offer the most cognitive benefits.

“My background is actually in Kinesiology, and I’ve always been excited to do a cognitive training study that involved exercise in a targeted fashion,” said study author Joaquin A. Anguera, the director of Neuroscape‘s Clinical Division and an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. “Some people want to do cognitive training while moving rather than sitting down, and that really spoke to me as a possibility for real benefits given anecdotal stories about games like ‘Dance Dance Revolution.'”

The researchers designed a randomized, placebo-controlled study to test whether the BBT intervention could improve older adults’ attention and physical fitness. First, they recruited a sample of 49 healthy older adults with an average age of 68 and randomly assigned them to one of two groups. One group (24 people) participated in the Body-Brain Trainer, an 8-week on-site intervention assisted by a trainer. The other group (25 people) was an active, expectancy-matched control group that participated in the Mind-Body Trainer, a 6-week at-home training assisted by three iOS apps.