Older Adults' Engagement During an Intervention Involving Off-the-Shelf Videogame.
OBJECTIVE
The overall goal of our current study was to examine older adults' experience of Flow (i.e., subjective engagement) during the course of a home-based cognitive training program.


METHODS
In this study, participants took part in a home-based training program. They were randomized to one of the two training groups. One group played an off-the-shelf videogame (i.e., Crazy Taxi), and the other group played a brain training game (i.e., Insight). Training consisted of 60 training sessions of 1 hour each, which were completed in 3 months (5 hours a week). After each training session, participants completed a Flow questionnaire to measure their engagement with the training.


RESULTS
The analysis was performed with a linear growth curve model. The results indicate that on average, there was no change in flow for the Insight group between time points. There was no difference between the initial flow status of the Insight group and the Crazy Taxi group. However, the interaction between group membership and time was statistically significant, indicating that the participants in the Crazy Taxi group increased their scores at each week at a rate that was 0.99 larger than those in the Insight group.


CONCLUSIONS
The analyses revealed that both groups experienced increase in Flow over the period, but only participants in the Crazy Taxi group significantly improved in Flow. This has long-term implications since we would expect participation to go beyond 12 weeks in a real-world scenario.
1 School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, McGill University , Montreal, Canada .|2 Centre de Recherche de l'Institut Universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal , Montreal, Canada .
Patrícia
P
Belchior
3 Clinical and Health Psychology Department, University of Florida , Gainesville, Florida.
Michael
M
Marsiske
4 College of Education, University of Florida , Gainesville, Florida.
Walter L
WL
Leite
5 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Kaiser Permanente - Northern California .
Anna
A
Yam
3 Clinical and Health Psychology Department, University of Florida , Gainesville, Florida.
Kelsey
K
Thomas
6 Center of Innovation and Disability and Rehabilitation Research, Gainesville, Florida.
William
W
Mann
D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D018910:Video Games / Q000523:psychology*