I Work Out!: Brain Training

Editorial Note: I'm really excited about this week's topic because we are going to hear from a very good friend of mine, Dr. Jason Chein. In today's post, our guest writer is going to discuss a highly controversial and extremely interesting topic: brain training. Dr. Chein has conducted research in this area [1-3], which is why I'm so excited that he agreed to write this week's post. Take it away, Jason!

Is it time to hit the gym…for your brain? 

With so many advertisements and pop-culture books claiming that you can achieve a “smarter you” in just a few minutes a day of “brain training,” you might be thinking about hitting the cognitive gym. But don’t start strapping on your brain workout gear just yet. In today’s post I’ll take you through a brief history of some brain training research, and tell you about where the field stands today. (Hint: it’s not ready for primetime.)

If you were going by what had been the conventional wisdom in experimental psychology for the last several decades, then brain training — engaging in regular mental exercises that are intended to enhance your general cognitive functioning — would seem like a pretty silly idea. Just about all of the research from the mid-1960’s up through the turn of the millennium indicated that, while you could get incredibly good at just about any task (even really demanding ones) with enough practice, the benefits would be observed only for that specific task, and wouldn't transfer to other mentally challenging activities. Take for example the seminal work of Chase and Simon (1973) exploring the amazing memory of chess experts [4]. With just a few seconds to glance at the arrangement of pieces on the chessboard, advanced chess players can reconstruct the position of nearly every piece. Pretty impressive stuff! But, that’s true only if the pieces are in positions that “make sense” in the course of actual game play. If you change things up so that the pieces are placed randomly on the board (not in positions that would occur in a real game), then the experts’ memory drops to near novice levels (see for yourself in this video posted by psychologist Daniel Simons). And, it turns out that playing all that chess doesn't make someone generally smarter than others, or any better at problem solving in other situations. All those thousands of hours of practice and all it’s good for is beating someone at chess? Yep.

Core Strength

In the ensuing years, many psychologists have tried to find a mentally engaging activity that would leave a bigger footprint on the landscape of cognitive functioning, but time and time again the results suggested that practice with a given skill just doesn't transfer to other skills. So, you'd think everyone would have given up on the idea of brain training long ago (and many had). But in the early 2000's a new(ish) idea started to gain some traction. What if, just as performance with many physical activities can be enhanced by focusing exercises on "core" musculature, intellectual functioning could be generally improved by focusing mental exercises on "core" cognitive systems. Makes sense, right? And, based on a large body of prior behavioral experiments, and corroborating neuroimaging studies, researchers had a pretty good idea what some of those “core” cognitive abilities might be. One that seemed especially promising was working memory; the topic of an earlier post from Dr. Bob. Working memory is supposed to serve as a general workspace for the mind, and a slew of studies show that individual differences in working memory capacity can explain why some people excel while others lag behind on a very wide range of cognitively demanding tasks. If the capacity of this general mental workspace could somehow be expanded, perhaps through repeated exercises that target working memory, this could have a profound impact on overall intellectual functioning!

With this basic idea in mind, a few pioneering researchers decided to throw caution to the wind and to try their hand once again at the brain training enterprise. And, to many scientists great surprise (especially those who were pretty settled on the conclusion that practice just doesn’t transfer), the early results looked really promising. First came a pair of studies showing that training focused on working memory and other executive processes was effective in improving cognitive performance among kids diagnosed with ADHD, and it turned out, even among the healthy kids and college students who had been included as the comparison groups in those studies [5, 6]. Those exciting early results inspired another study [7] that really captured the imagination of the field, showing that scores on a test of general fluid intelligence (the closest thing we have to an index of someone’s general intellectual ability) were improved by working memory training, and in a dose dependent fashion (more training = more improvement). At the time that paper was published, I was myself already engaged in another working memory training study [1], which ultimately showed that a month of training could enhance both attention control and reading comprehension in college students (we looked, but didn’t find any evidence of improved fluid intelligence in this group).

Drinking From the Firehose

What started as a trickle of papers on working memory training soon turned into a deluge. Study after study seemed to be finding the same basic thing: that mental exercises targeting core functions of the mind (not just working memory, but also other “executive” and attentional functions) could produce meaningful transfer to important intellectual abilities. Yay, brain training works!…right?

Well, that depends on who you ask and what you mean by “works.” This is where the story gets interesting (and complicated, but don’t worry, I’ll keep it simple). After some of the initial excitement wore off, reports of failed replication attempts and null results (studies showing no benefits of training) started to come in. Others trying to reproduce the most impressive findings, like the gains in fluid intelligence and improvements in ADHD symptoms, weren’t always meeting with as much success. It seemed like the field was dividing into camps: let’s call them the ‘believers’ and the ‘doubters’. The doubters were understandably worried about failed replications, and raised some really important concerns about the methods used in earlier studies (like whether the groups that completed training and those that didn’t just had different expectations about how they should perform, similar to the placebo effect that can arise in drug studies). The believers kept at it, improved their studies to address the doubters’ concerns, and, even with these more careful measures in place (e.g., better control groups), many of their studies continued to produce exciting results.

So, which camp is right, the believers or the doubters? In situations like this we need to take a step back and look at the overall pattern and weight of the evidence. One way to do that is through meta-analysis – pull all of the relevant studies together, account for the size of the study sample (how many people participated) by giving more weight to larger studies, and then look to see where the “truth” lies. But here too the doubters and believers come to different conclusions. That’s because the answer you get depends on which specific studies you think should count, which methods you use to gauge the size of the training effect produced by each study, and most importantly, which behavioral outcomes you decide to focus on. There isn’t much debate about the benefits of training on tasks that are really similar to those that made up the training regime (we call these “near transfer” measures). In general, training does seem to improve performance on closely related tasks. So, if by “works” you mean “makes you better able to remember lists of things” (and indeed, that might be an important skill in some scenarios), then yes, it looks like training works. But does it boost your IQ, sharpen your attention, and improve your overall cognitive acumen (does it lead to “far transfer”)? I’d say we just don’t know yet. While there is some evidence that it can do these things, the overall body of evidence isn’t unequivocally favorable. But on the flip side, there also isn’t enough evidence that it doesn’t work (getting a little technical here, Bayesian factor analysis suggests that there is neither enough evidence to accept the claim nor to reject it). So pick your favorite metaphor – the jury is still out, the dust hasn’t settled, the waters are still too muddy – and maybe wait until the next New Year before you make a brain training resolution.

About the Author

Dr. Jason M. Chein is currently a faculty member at Temple University, where he is the principle investigator of the Neurocognition Lab. I met Jason in 1998 when we were both graduate students at the Learning Research and Development Center. While in grad school, Jason became an expert in cognitive neuroscience, which included learning cool methodologies like conducting studies using fMRI. While in grad school, Jason also became quite proficient at frisbee golf.

For More Information

[1] Chein, J., & Morrison, A. (2010). Expanding the mind’s workspace: Training and trans- fer effects with a complex working memory span task. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17(2), 193–199.

[2] Morrison, A. B., & Chein, J. M. (2011). Does working memory training work? The promise and challenges of enhancing cognition by training working memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(1), 46-60.

[3] Morrison, A. B., & Chein, J. M. (2012). The controversy over Cogmed. Journal of Applied Research in memory and Cognition, 1(3), 208-210.

[4] Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive psychology, 4(1), 55-81.

[5] Klingberg, T., Forssberg, H., & Westerberg, H. (2002). Training of working memory in children with ADHD. Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, 24(6), 781-791.

[6] Klingberg, T., Fernell, E., Olesen, P. J., Johnson, M., Gustafsson, P., Dahlström, K., Gillberg, C.G., Forssberg, H., & Westerberg, H. (2005). Computerized training of working memory in children with ADHD-a randomized, controlled trial. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 44(2), 177-186.

[7] Jaeggi, S. M., Buschkuehl, M., Jonides, J., & Perrig, W. J. (2008). Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(19), 6829-6833.