Putting brain training to the test
Owen AM, Hampshire A, Grahn JA, Stenton R, Dajani S, Burns AS, Howard RJ, Ballard CG · 2010
grade Arctindependentreplicated
Sample
11,430 participants completing a six-week online trial
Population
General adult population recruited through a BBC television programme (out of the 4-18 age band)
Design
The largest brain-training trial ever run, with randomised allocation to training regimes and a control condition, and a battery of untrained benchmarking tests. Its population is adults, which matters for an ages 4-18 archive - it is retained because it is the field's flagship experimental test and because the child-specific evidence (Roberts 2016, Sala & Gobet 2020, Kassai 2019) points the same way.
Key findings
Improvements were observed on EVERY ONE of the trained cognitive tasks. No evidence of transfer to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related. The authors conclude the central question is transfer, and that commercial claims of general cognitive improvement lack empirical support.
Genetic confound
Low - randomised allocation, and the within-person trained-vs-untransferred contrast is immune to between-person confounding.
DOI / URL
Effects
| Outcome | Metric | Value | Measure | Timing | Vs | Horizon | Class |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trained tasks | pre-post change | improvement on every trained task | researcher-designed | 6 weeks | none | end-of-treatment | near-transfer |
| Untrained tasks, including closely related ones | transfer | no evidence of transfer | standardized | 6 weeks | business-as-usual | end-of-treatment | far-transfer |
Cited by
- Does working-memory or brain training transfer to intelligence and achievement?no effectconf: highgc: low