The York team recently compared 94 bilinguals and monolinguals between the ages of 30 and 80. It found that while both groups started showing cognitive decline by age 60, the rate of slowing for bilinguals was much slower.

Now young people who play video games are showing this similar pattern of high performance in resisting irrelevant impulses. The current report compared 50 avid players against 50 non-players and then subdivided each group between bilinguals and monolinguals.

When asked to describe the colour of the word “blue,” for example, when it is written in green ink, non-players were far more likely to choose the dominant impulse and say “blue,” though the colour is green. “The are much harder to mislead, to trick,” Prof. Bialystok said. —Carolyn Abraham —Better living through video games? (The Globe and Mail)