By Scott the floating head of Dr. Kawashima is on to something! Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have recently completed a study on gaming's effect on the more mature population.
The study consisted of 40 participants aged between 60 and 70, which formed two groups. The first played the real time strategy PC game Rise of Nations for approximately 23 hours over the duration of a month. Meanwhile the second group did not play any games.
The verdict is in. The gaming participants showed improvements in cognitive tests for memory, multi-tasking and reasoning. Researches have been careful not to jump the gun as no 'official' conclusions will be made until further studies are conducted. Overall this looks like yet another positive tick for gaming (pending further research of course) to those outside of the main stream gaming audience.
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