Adults over age 65 represent the fastest growing population in the US. Decline in cognitive abilities is a hallmark of advanced age and is associated with loss of independence and dementia risk. There is a pressing need to develop effective interventions for slowing or reversing the cognitive aging process. While certain forms of cognitive training have shown promise in this area, effects only sometimes transfer to neuropsychological tests within or outside the trained domain. This paper describes a NIA-funded Phase III adaptive multisite randomized clinical trial, examining whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of frontal cortices enhances neurocognitive outcomes achieved from cognitive training in older adults experiencing age-related cognitive decline: the Augmenting Cognitive Training in Older Adults study (ACT).
ACT will enroll 360 participants aged 65 to 89 with age-related cognitive decline, but not dementia. Participants will undergo cognitive training intervention or education training-control combined with tDCS or sham tDCS control. Cognitive training employs a suite of eight adaptive training tasks focused on attention/speed of processing and working memory from Posit Science BrainHQ. Training control involves exposure to educational nature/history videos and related content questions of the same interval/duration as the cognitive training. Participants are assessed at baseline, after training (12weeks), and 12-month follow-up on our primary outcome measure, NIH Toolbox Fluid Cognition Composite Score, as well as a comprehensive neurocognitive, functional, clinical and multimodal neuroimaging battery.
The findings from this study have the potential to significantly enhance efforts to ameliorate cognitive aging and slow dementia.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 9. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 19 May 2026.
All research outputs
#5,390,583
of 32,770,949 outputs
Outputs from Contemporary Clinical Trials
#333
of 1,881 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#82,687
of 480,408 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Contemporary Clinical Trials
#8
of 32 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 32,770,949 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 83rd percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,881 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 8.9. This one has done well, scoring higher than 82% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 480,408 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 82% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 32 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 75% of its contemporaries.
