This project assesses whether a five-week cognitive training intervention improves measures of cognition, complex motor control, and performance in a driving simulator task for both young and older adults. In recent work by the research team and others, a particular type of cognitive training showed transfer benefits to untrained tasks. Moreover, interdependence between the cognitive and motor systems was found to increase with age. What is not clear is whether cognitive training benefits will also transfer to real-world tasks such as driving. Identifying an intervention that allows older adults to extend their safe driving years would have immense societal benefits. It is also of theoretical interest to determine whether cognitive training improvements transfer to tasks that are both “near to” and “far from” the training task, because it would provide insight into which aspects of cognition are malleable with practice.

Principal Investigator: Rachael Seidler (U-M Kinesiology, Psychology)
Co-Investigators: John Jonides (U-M Psychology), Martin Buschkuehl (U-M Psychology), Susanne Jaeggi (U-M Psychology), Jessica Bernard (U-M Psychology), Pamela Hall (Michigan Office of Services to the Aging), and Peggy Brey (Michigan Office of Services to the Aging)

Click below to view the final report:
     Cognitive Training as an Intervention to Improve Driving Ability in the Older Adult

Use the following links to watch a 5-minute wrap-up video about the project:
The first two versions were designed to work with Windows Media Player (WMP), if they do not open correctly, please right click, then save the file, and open it with WMP: Large / Small
Quicktime/iTunes file: Small