Fig. 1

The two circles illustrate the beneficial effect of cognitive training in both clinical and laboratorial studies. The “bedside” semi-circle includes major cognitive trainings that have been tried in healthy old adults, MCI and AD patients. In contrary to heterogeneity of human, mouse models in “bench” semi-circle are nearly monotonous: enriched environment, which offers colorful housing condition including social, sensory and cognitive enrichment. Social enrichment allows more mice dwelling at a large cage to gain companionship and communication. Sensory enrichment provides animals with more novel and complex environments, ladders, colorful toys and various objects for example. And cognitive enrichment stimulates animals’ cognitive processes, particularly learning and memory, in form of maze solving. Exposure to EE could improve animals’ cognitive performance and rescue brain atrophy, which elicited by a number of key molecular and cellular factors, acting at a single neuron or neural circuit level. The shared part of two circles demonstrates neurological effect of interventions for both human and mice, including behavioral, brain structural, neuronal and neural chemicals changes