People who stay mentally stimulated and physically active can delay onset of cognitive decline. Daniel Erkstam/Flickr, CC BY-SA
“Older people may be able to learn more from visual information than their younger counterparts, according to a study published today in the journal Current Biology.
“‘The take-home message the study authors gave was that healthy older people are good at learning,’ said Professor Henry Brodaty, co-Director of the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) at UNSW. ‘They have the same plasticity, but they’re not as good at filtering out other information.’
“The brain needs to be able to easily learn new information (plasticity), and filter out irrelevant information (stability). The experiment was designed to test whether ageing affects the brain’s plasticity, stability, or both.
“The researchers had ten 67 to 79-year-olds and ten 19 to 30-year-olds view screens displaying six letters interspersed with two numbers. Each screen also had moving dots in the background, and the participants were asked to report just the numbers.”
Continue reading this article from The Conversation, click here.
