THE SIMA-PROJECT - EFFECTS OF 1 YEAR COGNITIVE AND PSYCHOMOTOR TRAINING ON COGNITIVE-ABILITIES OF THE ELDERLY

In an interdisciplinary project on maintaining and supporting independ ent living in old age, (a) competence training, (b) memory training ad d (c) psychomotor training as well as (d) combined competence and psyc homotor training and (e) combined memory and psychomotor training was performed with n=309 elderly of 75 to 89 years of age for 9 months. Re gardless of treatment conditions, an age-related decline of health and subjective well-being was found 1 year after the end of the training. The specific training measures each led to highly significant specifi c improvements of the trained functions. A favorable influence of comp etence training on everyday coping and hence on active strategies for staying independent as well as of memory training on all cognitive fun ctions and especially on memory performance was found. While global ps ychomotor performance was not significantly improved, effects of psych omotor training on specific functions were detected. In addition, the combined psychomotor and memory training led to an improvement of psyc homotor performance and to a reduction of symptoms of dementia, even t hough neither psychomotor training alone nor memory training alone res ulted in such effects. Neurophysiological changes leading to a provisi on of reserve-capacity of CNS-performance are among other effects assu med as an explanation.