A Language-Based Training Intervention to Enhance Cognitive Health in Community-Dwelling Older Adults
National Taiwan University Hospital
120 participants
Sep 2, 2025
INTERVENTIONAL
Conditions
Summary
Taiwan is fast approaching a super-aged society, making it urgent to bolster cognitive health in otherwise healthy older adults. This integrated project tackles that need with a language-centered intervention grounded in predictive-coding and active-inference theory. Over 12 weeks, community-dwelling adults aged 65 + join small-group reading-and-writing workshops that train them to actively predict, monitor, and revise linguistic information. Ninety volunteers are randomly allocated to an active language-prediction group, a passive reading group, or a hobby board-game control. Before and after the course, researchers collect behavioural tests, EEG, fMRI, and AI-based speech-language analytics to quantify gains and transfer effects across cognition, emotion, and daily function.
Eligibility
Inclusion Criteria7
- Aged between 20 and 30 (healthy young adults) or aged 65 and above (healthy older adults).
- Native Mandarin Chinese speakers who had no exposure to non-indigenous languages before the age of five.
- Have completed at least a junior high school level of education.
- Right-handed.
- Have normal or corrected-to-normal vision (e.g., through glasses or contact lenses).
- Able to fully participate in the entire assessment and intervention schedule (with no more than two missed intervention sessions).
- Achieve a score of 23 or higher on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA).
Exclusion Criteria7
- Participation in another cognitive intervention program within the past two months.
- Cognitive intervention is not feasible due to dyslexia or physical illness. Meet the diagnostic criteria for Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or dementia.
- Presence of severe depression, or cognitive changes caused by other psychiatric, neurological disorders, or substance abuse, with symptoms that are unstable or interfere with functioning.
- History of brain injury or neurological conditions (e.g., stroke, aneurysm).
- Contraindications for MRI scanning, such as metal implants, pacemakers, or pregnancy.
- Claustrophobia (an anxiety disorder characterized by panic symptoms or fear of panic attacks in enclosed spaces such as elevators, vehicles, tunnels, or airplane cabins).
- Unable to undergo cognitive assessments due to visual or hearing impairments.
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Interventions
Participants will join reading or writing activities and come up with their own inference about wording or plots.
Participants will join reading or writing activities and will be given step-by-step explanations about the wording and plots.
Participants will play board games with each other.
Locations(1)
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NCT07132281