Cognitive training exercises can help older adults maintain or improve certain mental skills, such as memory and attention. Such training can also lead to improvements in cognitive abilities not specifically trained for, according to recent research from The University of Texas at Dallas. “Activation of specific age-sensitive brain regions during various task-switching scenarios indicates that training at task-switching may be responsible for documented improvements in other cognitive abilities,” Basak said. “These regions included multiple hub regions of cognitive control as well as regions associated with motor processing. “The more that older adults activate left prefrontal regions, the better they perform on task-switching and other unrelated cognitive tasks.