Short- and long-term benefits of cognitive training

Jaeggi, Susanne M.; Buschkuehl, Martin; Jonides, John; Shah, Priti · 2011 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1103228108

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Summary

This study investigates the efficacy of cognitive training, specifically examining whether working memory (WM) training in children leads to improvements in fluid intelligence (Gf) and whether these effects persist over time. Motivated by the controversy surrounding commercial "brain training" claims and the sparse scientific evidence for transfer effects, the authors aimed to determine if WM training could enhance general cognitive abilities in typically developing school-aged children. The research specifically sought to identify individual differences that moderate training outcomes and to assess the long-term durability of any observed benefits. The experimental design involved 62 elementary and middle school children who underwent one month of daily training, five times a week. Participants were assigned to either an experimental group or an active control group. The experimental group trained on an adaptive spatial n-back task, a video game-like WM exercise that adjusted difficulty based on performance. The control group engaged in a similarly engaging task involving general knowledge and vocabulary questions, which did not target WM. Cognitive performance was assessed before training, immediately after, and three months later using two matrix reasoning tasks (TONI and Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices) as proxies for Gf. The experimental group was further subdivided based on their improvement on the training task: those with large training gains versus those with small gains. The results demonstrated that the experimental group significantly improved on the n-back training task, whereas the control group showed no significant improvement. Crucially, there was no overall group difference in transfer to Gf measures. However, when analyzing individual differences, only children who achieved large gains in WM training showed significant improvements in fluid intelligence compared to both the control group and the low-gain experimental subgroup. This correlation between training gain and transfer effect was significant. Furthermore, these differential benefits persisted after a three-month hiatus from training, with the high-gain group maintaining superior performance relative to the other groups. The study ruled out alternative explanations, finding that initial ability levels, processing speed, and motivation did not account for the transfer effects; rather, the perceived difficulty of the task and the magnitude of improvement on the training task were the critical factors. The study concludes that cognitive training can be effective and produce long-lasting improvements in fluid intelligence, but these benefits are not universal. Instead, transfer effects are critically dependent on individual differences in training performance. The authors argue that future research should shift from asking whether brain training works to determining which training regimens, conditions, and populations yield the best transfer effects. They suggest that optimizing task difficulty to keep participants within their "zone of proximal development" may be essential for maximizing cognitive gains.

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• simulator training transfer