September is Healthy Aging Month, and Beckman researchers are studying how to improve working memory in older adults.

“People often think that the best way to get better at something is to simply practice it over and over again, but robust skill learning is actually supported by variation in practice,” said lead investigator Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow, a Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology researcher and professor emerita of educational psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Stine-Morrow and other researchers found that varied practice, not repetition, primed older adults to learn a new working memory task. Their findings, which appear in the journal Intelligence, propose diverse cognitive training as a promising whetstone for maintaining mental sharpness as we age.

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