Videogames aren’t just for kids – special ones can help seniors upgrade their ability to pay attention while they’re driving, a study shows.

Attention is a limited resource. Essentially, people focus on only one thing at a time, so if we multitask when driving, our attention shifts away from the basic activity of directing the car.

This ability to multitask declines after we reach our 20’s, but a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, suggests that this can be turned around, as an experiment conducted by Adam Gazzaley, a University of California at San Francisco neuroscientist, showed.

He trained people ages 60-to-85 to use a videogame called Neuroracer, which involves simulated driving along a winding road while quickly pressing keys or a game controller to respond to a green sign when it appears on the roadside. As the control, some subjects played a single-task version of the game that omitted the winding road and involved only noticing and responding to the green sign.

After 12 hours of training, the multitasking subjects were about twice as efficient at shifting attention as when they started, a huge improvement by any standard. Remarkably, their new scores were comparable to those of 20-year-olds not trained on NeuroRacer. Not only that, they also got an unexpected brain bonus – their sustained concentration and working memory improved as well, the report said.