Brain Training: Do Computerized Games Improve Cognitive Ability?
Post by Flora Moujaes
What's the science?
In recent years, a billion-dollar industry has emerged. It posits that you can enhance your cognitive ability, and even your IQ, simply by completing computerized games. But does science really support this claim? A limited number of studies have shown that training on a cognitive task can improve your performance on other tasks that recruit similar cognitive mechanisms; however many studies have failed to replicate these results. Even when training involves different tasks that engage multiple cognitive systems, research has shown that participants just get better at completing the specific tasks, rather than improving their general cognitive ability. This week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Stojanoski and colleagues conducted a large-scale online study, investigating whether brain-training tasks improve cognitive ability.
How did they do it?
The authors recruited 11,000 individuals online from a total of 145 countries. Over 1000 participants were active users of commercially available brain training programs including Luminosity, Peak, Elevate, Brian HQ and Neural Nation. The brain-training participants had used such programs for an average of 8.5 months. The authors assessed the participants’ general cognitive function using the Cambridge Brian Sciences online assessment battery, which measures cognitive skills such as working memory, verbal ability, reasoning, decision-making, and inhibitory control.
What did they find?
To see if brain training produces generalizable improvements in high-level cognition, the authors compared whether on average the 1009 participants with an active history of active brain training performed better than a demographically matched group who had no such history. The authors found that there was no difference in performance between active brain trainers and non-brain trainers, even when they compared non-brain trainers to those brain trainers who had been training for longest. They also examined whether the amount of time spent using brain training programs increased cognitive performance, but found that there was no relationship between self-reported length of time participants devoted to brain training and cognitive performance.
What's the impact?
The findings of this study do not support computerized games as a way to improve cognitive performance. Given that a billion-dollar industry with over 70 million active users has been built on this premise, more research is needed into whether such brain-training programs are really worth people’s time and money. In particular, studies that employ a within-subject design or follow participants over time are needed in order to draw stronger conclusions.
A word of caution: The methodology in this study did not take into account individual improvements within-subjects (comparing each participant’s cognitive ability before and after brain training), and participants were not randomly assigned to receive brain training.
Stojanoski et al. Brain training habits are not associated with generalized benefits to cognition: An online study of over 1000 “brain trainers”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2020). Access the original scientific publication here.