They randomized people into four groups. They’ve got memory training, reasoning training, speed training, and a control group which really just gets the repeat measures – has no actual intervention. They also did something which no other study has done all at once. They included self-report, paper and pencil measures, and observation to have a sense of how people are really changing and if how you measure it may show something differently. They also looked at quality of life and health service utilization and everyday mobility.

Let me go back here. They’re hoping to find out rather or not any of these interventions change real life activity. They acknowledged that one of the things that has been missing is that we know that if you go to a class and they like train you on something we have shown, at least in some studies, that you will do better on a test at the end. But how do people do in everyday life? This study is probably the best I’ve seen designed so far that may start to answer that but I don’t have the answers on that one yet.