EPISODE 1 - PETER WAIS

“Virtual Reality video game improves high-fidelity memory in older adults”

EPISODE 1

Peter Wais

Peter Wais is currently an Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of California San Francisco's Department of Neurology and serves as a faculty member of Neuroscape, which is a translational neuroscience center at the University of California San Francisco.

Direct link to episode research paper

Direct link to the Neuroscape Center at UCSF

Video brief about the Neuroscape Center at UCSF

Direct link to Peter’s Google Scholar page

Direct link to Peter’s ResearchGate page

Direct link to Peter’s personal website

Direct link to Peter’s LinkedIn

IN THE MEDIA

“Virtual Reality Brings Joy to People in Assisted-Living Facilities” - Wall Street Journal

In this episode, Kristian speaks with Peter Wais about the problems associated with declining high-fidelity long term memory (LTM) in older adults and how interactive video games can be used to combat this decline as the brain ages. In this particular research, Peter and his team developed a spatial wayfinding game in Virtual Reality to evaluate whether this particular medium could be used as a cognitive intervention to improve high fidelity long term memory of older adults.

RESEARCH PAPER EXTRACTS

“Neither cognitive interventions, nor pharmaceutical treatments, are available today to restore high-fidelity LTM capabilities, which decline in normal aging and are substantially impaired at the outset of Alzheimer’s Disease. Decline in high-fidelity LTM capabilities for older adults is directly linked with diminished hippocampal function, whether or not directly attributable to a neurodegenerative condition. The Labyrinth-VR intervention is aimed to restore high-fidelity LTM capabilities via adaptive training in a task that engages with hippocampal-dependent LTM functions.”

“An emerging consensus in the memory literature finds that encoding and retrieving different types of high-fidelity memories depend upon multiple hippocampal sub regions and their linked functional networks with cortex. Importantly, episodic, spatial, associative and temporal order are all types of high-fidelity LTM memories that are required for efficient spatial wayfinding.”

“In order to establish baseline results on a primary measure of high-fidelity LTM, Experiment 1 compared high-fidelity LTM performance between younger and healthy older adults using a mnemonic discrimination task (i.e., MDT). We adapted MDT for our research from a well-established test of behavioral pattern separation task that is thought to depend on hippocampal functions. Then with a separate group of healthy older adults, Experiment 2 examined the treatment-induced effects of Labyrinth-VR on this primary memory outcome measure, MDT, as well as two other memory measures (i.e., recent autobiographical memory and spatial recognition). We expected the comparison of MDT results between Experiments 1 and 2 to show: (i) replication of baseline performance for healthy older adults between two groups, and, importantly (ii), whether hypothesized training-induced gains in high-fidelity LTM for healthy older adults would restore their performance to a level on par with younger adults.”

“After treatment for 12 hours in the Labyrinth spatial wayfinding VR game, older adults with average cognitive performance for their ages demonstrated reliable gains in an untrained measure of high-fidelity LTM retrieval, relative to matched older adults who played placebo control games. This report provides the first evidence from a randomized control study supporting our concept for an intervention that improves high-fidelity LTM ability in older adults.”

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