Can Social Card Games Boost Brain Power in Older Adults?
Playing specially designed card games in a social group improves cognitive control in healthy older adults compared to standard board games or waiting on a list.
Source
Let's Play Cards: Multi-Component Cognitive Training With Social Engagement Enhances Executive Control in Older Adults
Study at a glance
- Design
- RCT — 8-week, twice-weekly group sessions: custom executive-control card games vs commercial board games vs waitlist
- N
- N=69 · 23 healthy older adults per arm, recruited from Taipei community centers
- Population
- Healthy older community volunteers in Taipei able to attend an 8-week program
- Outcome
- Composite executive-control gain after card-game training (reported effect size 0.19); no transfer to delayed memory or abstract reasoning
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Can Social Card Games Boost Brain Power in Older Adults?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
69 healthy older adults overall
A total of 69 participants provides a power of 0.92 to detect a medium-sized effect ( η p 2 = 0.15).
23 participants per group
Given the difficulty in recruiting participants, we recruited only 23 participants for each group, which fulfilled the goal of including a minimum of 20 subjects per study condition to have sufficient power to detect most effects ().
What they did
The researchers divided 69 healthy older adults into three groups of 23 participants each. One group received 8 weeks of training using custom card games designed to exercise mental control, meeting twice a week for sessions lasting 75 minutes. Another group played commercial board games for the same duration to act as an active control, while a waitlist control group did not change their routine.
What they found
Only the cognitive training group showed a significant improvement in overall executive control, with a large effect size of 0.19. The active control group showed only a marginal trend of improvement, and the waitlist control group showed none. No group saw selective improvements in delayed memory or abstract reasoning, meaning the training benefits did not transfer to unrelated cognitive tasks.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study cannot show if these mental benefits persist over the long term because the researchers did not conduct a follow-up assessment. Because the training was conducted in a social group setting, the study cannot isolate the benefits of the card games from the positive effects of social interaction itself. Additionally, the small sample size of 23 people per group limits the study's ability to detect smaller cognitive changes or generalize the findings to a broader population.
Key terms
- Executive control
- A set of mental processes, such as attention and working memory, that help individuals plan, focus, and complete goal-directed tasks.
- Active control group
- A comparison group in an experiment that receives an alternative activity or treatment to rule out the effects of participation and attention alone.
- Near transfer
- The improvement on untrained tasks that rely on the same mental processes and brain regions as the trained tasks.
- Far transfer
- The improvement on tasks that do not share overlapping mental processes or neural pathways with the trained activity.
- Cognitive reserve
- The brain's ability to improvise and find alternate ways of getting a job done, which helps buffer against age-related decline.
- Working memory
- A cognitive system with a limited capacity that is responsible for temporarily holding and manipulating information.
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Common questions
Why did the researchers use card games instead of computer brain training games?
Card games provide a natural and fun way to combine structured mental challenges with active social engagement, which is easier to implement in community settings than solitary computer programs.
Did the commercial board games help the participants at all?
The commercial board games led to a slight, non-significant trend toward improvement, likely because they required players to follow rules and plan strategies, though to a lesser degree than the custom games.
Did this card game training help improve the participants' everyday memory?
No, the training did not improve delayed episodic memory, suggesting that the benefits of this cognitive program were limited to mental control and did not generalize to memory of everyday events.
What makes the custom card games different from standard card games?
The custom games were specifically designed to target multiple aspects of mental control, like focusing attention, updating memory, and managing dual tasks, with adjustable difficulty levels.
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