A few hours of attention training may lead to changes in brain activity that reflect improvement in attention. Wake Forest researchers yesterday released preliminary results indicating that following a series of attention workouts, older adults (age 65-75) were better at paying attention to visual information while ignoring distracting auditory information. Further, after training, fMRI scans revealed that the areas of the brain that responded to the distracting sounds became less active. Conversely, the areas involved in processing the visual information - which they were supposed to attend to - became more active.
There is an existing body of research demonstrating that the ability to attend can be improved with appropriate training, including research done by Lumos Labs showing that Lumosity improves visual attention. However, it is interesting to see a biological correlate of this change, which could be described as functional brain plasticity. I look
forward to the completion of the study, and publication of the full results.
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