Elderly people given cognitive training in a test by the Jockey Club Centre for Positive Ageing performed much better in reasoning and memory than those who were not given training.
In the test, the first of its kind in Hong Kong, half of a group of 223 elderly Chinese who had normal cognitive abilities were trained over a 12-week programme while the remainder, a control group, did not.
Assessments on abilities such as reasoning, memory and attention were conducted immediately after the programme, and again nine months later.
Compared with the control group, the participants in the test group performed much better, said the director of the centre, Dr Timothy Kwok Chi-yui.
One of the participants from the test group, 85-year-old Fung Hoi-chung, said: 'Now I feel like I'm more knowledgable. I can share with my friends who live alone some memory skills to keep their mind active.'
The test group was given simple memory tasks and instructed to adopt different memory techniques, such as making use of association and connection. For example, they had to bear in mind associations such as head for glasses and pocket for wallet and later recall them one by one.
The training could also be applied to their daily lives as a way to take care of personal belongings.