A Wii May Be a Win-Win

Researchers at North Carolina State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology are teaming up to take the next step in understanding games' benefits to cognitive functioning.

Anne McLaughlin, a North Carolina State assistant professor, has been awarded a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to uncover the aspects of games that have the most potential to improve cognitive functioning in older adults.

"We want to produce guidelines for people making games," McLaughlin said. "The goal is to predict beforehand whether they're working or not." Once the guidelines are understood, collaborators at Georgia Tech will incorporate them into real working games.

This is important because a majority of commercial software marketed as enhancing cognition or brain function, such as Nintendo "Brain Age," lack experimental evidence. The Food and Drug Administration does not evaluate or regulate claims about how such software could have beneficial health effects.

Companies such as Lumos Labs in San Francisco are not only developing cognitive training games, but also evaluating them.

"We are taking exercises and specific ways of doing cognitive development and converting them into games so that they are enjoyable enough for people to do," said Mike Scanlon, head of scientific operations at Lumos Labs.

The games on Lumos' site, Lumosity.com, aren't explicitly developed for older adults because training on games can provide benefits for a wide range of age groups.

Games are organized into training programs consisting of 20 to 40 sessions of 15 minutes each. Each session in turn can involve playing up to five different mini-games for a few minutes each.