Playing puzzles on your smartphone at an older age can boost the short-term memory of someone in their 20s, study shows

Playing a puzzle on your smartphone in old age could give you the short-term memory of someone in their 20s, a study suggests.

Researchers analyzed 181 individuals aged 60 to 81 who were asked about the digital games they played, in addition to 209 people aged 18 to 30.

Popular puzzles included crossword puzzles, online quizzes and sudoku, similar to those available in the Mail+ app.

The participants had to test their working memory – the ability to remember things like shopping lists or phone numbers for a short period of time – which starts to decline later in life.

Older people who said they played puzzles online performed almost as well in the test as people between the ages of 18 and 30 who did not play digital games.

(Stock Photo) Experts believe one reason behind puzzles that boost memory is that they boost focus and help people ignore distractions

Dr. Fiona McNab, who led the University of York study, said: ‘We think these results are really encouraging.

‘The older people who reported playing puzzle games had comparable working memory scores to the younger adults who reported not playing games.

‘This may be because people are able to preserve their working memory in old age by playing puzzle games.

‘But it could also be that older adults with better working memory are more likely to play puzzle games, so more research is needed.’

Of the 390 participants, 141 said they played zero digital games per week.

The rest were grouped into three categories based on whether the games they played were mainly puzzles, strategy games, such as online bridge and solitaire, or mainly action video games, which were most popular among the younger group.

To test people’s short-term memory, researchers showed volunteers a number of red circles in boxes within a grid that appeared for a second and then disappeared.

The volunteers had to remember the positions of the red circles, sometimes ignoring distracting yellow circles, while increasing the number of red circles they saw.

On average, younger people who did not play digital games could remember the position of eight red circles in their brains, while the older group managed just over six.

This was expected because working memory tends to decline as people age.

But older people who played puzzle games online remembered nearly seven red circles, meaning their memory wasn’t significantly different from that of some people old enough to be their children or grandchildren.

Even younger people who played puzzle games online did not have significantly better memories than older people who played them.

Experts believe that one reason behind puzzles that boost memory is that they boost focus and help people ignore distractions.

That’s useful if you’re trying to remember something important, like a shopping list, without getting sidetracked.

Older people doing puzzles were less likely to be distracted by yellow circles in the same grid as the red circles they had to remember, based on their scores in this task.

Older people in the study played digital puzzles for about ten hours a week, while younger people played about five hours.

But this was not linked to the results, as older people also spent more time playing strategy games, but had no better memory scores linked to these games.

Younger people, on average, had significantly better memory scores when they played strategy games instead of action games.

It may be that the strategy games played by older people are not as difficult as the games played by younger people.

The researchers say future studies could focus on why there is a difference between the effects of types of games depending on a player’s age, and whether this is related to how the brain stores information as people age.

The study was published in the journal Heliyon.