Generally, those who started either intervention with a more positive cognitive profile showed more cognitive growth, suggesting that cognitive resources enabled individuals to take advantage of environmental enrichment. However, moderators of change differed somewhat for those in the engagement and training interventions. On average, then, both groups appeared to show ability-specific effects. Those in the engagement condition, on the other hand, showed selective improvement in divergent thinking, a key ability exercised in creative problem solving. As predicted, those in the training condition showed selective improvement in inductive reasoning. We contrasted these 2 models of cognitive enrichment by randomly assigning healthy older adults to a home-based inductive reasoning training program, a team-based competitive program in creative problem solving, or a wait-list control. While a training model of cognitive intervention targets the improvement of particular skills through instruction and practice, an engagement model is based on the idea that being embedded in an intellectually and socially complex environment can impact cognition, perhaps even broadly, without explicit instruction. Thus, it serves both the practical function of informing the creation of evidence-based programs with potential to promote independence, social engagement, and continued participation in work and in civic institutions, as well as the scientific function of testing theories of cognitive aging. It also describes challenges for developing evidence-based principles of cognitive optimization that can be authentically translated into programs and social structures with potential to instantiate successful aging as a cultural norm. This chapter considers the different types of interventions that vary in the extent to which they involve direct exercise of target outcomes, from retest effects that are highly specific to target outcomes, to ability-specific training of different sorts, to lifestyle interventions that may only be tangentially related to measured outcomes.
Research findings in recent years from both animal models and on human learners converge clearly on the conclusion that there is plasticity in brain and behavior throughout the adult life span. These current results demonstrate that widespread administration of this short-term (4-week) evidence-based intervention is feasible. Previous iterations had all been administered by the professional actor/director/theatre professor who devised the program. This study addressed the feasibility of training multiple instructors of varying experience to administer this theatre-arts intervention.
002), word recall, MEPS, and verbal fluency (η²(p) ranging from. Experiment 2 (outside acting teacher) used the identical measures and revealed significant results on the OTDL-R (p =. 001), and on one cognitive measure, Means-End Problem-Solving (MEPS), as measured by a multivariate ANOVA (MANCOVA) and follow-up univariate ANOVAs. After random assignment to experimental or waiting-list control groups, participants were given pre- and posttests on both functional and cognitive measures.Įxperiment 1 showed that activity directors were able to run this intervention and achieve significant results on the 28-item functional measure (Observed Tasks of Daily Living, Revised ) as measured by a mixed-design analysis of variance (ANOVA) and paired-sample t tests (p <. The intervention consisted of twice-weekly 70-min lessons for 4 weeks. In Experiment 2, they investigated whether an outside professional acting teacher who received only minimal training via e-mail and telephone could successfully execute the same intervention heretofore only carried out by the actor/director/professor who devised it.Ī total of 115 participants (ages 68-94) in four different retirement homes were taught theatre arts either by their in-house activity director who had no formal training in theatre or a professional acting teacher recruited through a local community college. BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: In Experiment 1, the authors investigated whether they could train retirement home activity directors with no previous experience in theatre to successfully execute an evidence-based 4-week theatre-arts intervention.