Adults in their 70s and 80s are able to improve their ability to multitask cognitively as well as people in their 20s and 30s by playing online video games, according to a newly published study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Medical advances and improved lifestyles are allowing us to live longer. It’s important to factor brain health into that equation,” said the study’s lead author, Mark Steyvers, Ph.D., a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine. “We show that with consistent upkeep, cognitive youth can be retained well into our golden years.”

Steyvers and colleagues, partnering with Luminosity, randomly sampled the performance of approximately 1,000 users of the Ebb and Flow game, which calls on the brain to shift between cognitive processes to interpret shapes and movement. Users, who played the game between 2012 and 2017, were divided into two groups: those aged 21 to 80 who had completed fewer than 60 training sessions, and those aged 71 to 80 who had logged at least 1,000 sessions of playing the game.

The majority of older and highly practiced players were able to match or exceed the performance of younger users who had not played the game very much, the researchers found. Any lead the older adults had, however, significantly declined after the 21- to 30-year-olds had completed more than 10 practice sessions.