Enhancing Brain Training With Virtual Reality

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Brain training is a large and a growing field, both scientifically and commercially. Emerging evidence demonstrates that training can promote beneficial brain plasticity in both healthy individuals and clinical populations. Much of the recent interest in brain training can be traced back to the semi...

Brain training is a large and a growing field, both scientifically and commercially. Emerging evidence demonstrates that training can promote beneficial brain plasticity in both healthy individuals and clinical populations. Much of the recent interest in brain training can be traced back to the seminal work done at the University of Rochester, where Daphne Bavelier and colleagues showed that training with action video games (AVG) can lead to a wide range of cognitive and perceptual improvements. In our recent work, we developed a novel training paradigm that isolates and concentrates the key aspects of AVG-training while eliminating complex and often violent gameplay associated with AVGs. The results revealed similarly broad effects of training as with conventional AVGs. In this study, we aim to move this training paradigm to virtual reality (VR) and extend its application to cognitive aging and mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) populations.

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