Briana Sprague, PhD, says healthy snacks and brain games enhance cognition among less-educated seniors.
Transcript:
What we found is that individuals with fewer years of formal education really benefit from certain types of cognitive training programs, and one of those is speed of processing training. Whether we get dementia or not, we all tend to process things a little slower as we age. And so the idea is that this kind of cognitive training is beneficial for these folks in a similar way that when you do exercise programs, you’re not taking somebody who has never been physically active and automatically enrolling them to run a marathon. It’s a similar idea that individuals with fewer years of education, this training can give them an extra boost to their cognition, to their speed of processing. So that is one reason why we focused on this group. We thought it would be particularly helpful for them. Another one is that, in general, these adults are not the focus of intervention trials. So this is an underserved population as well.
