It’s an attractive idea: By playing online problem-solving, matching and other games for a few minutes a day, people can improve such mental abilities as reasoning, verbal skills and memory. But whether these games deliver on those promises is up for debate.
“They put brain training to the test,” says Elizabeth Stine-Morrow, a cognitive aging scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While the study doesn’t show why brain trainers aren’t seeing benefits, it does show there is no link “between the amount of time spent with the brain training programs and cognition,” Stine-Morrow says. “That was pretty cool.”
The researchers recruited 8,563 volunteers globally through Cambridge Brain Sciences, a Toronto-based company that provides assessments to measure healthy brain function. (While several of the researchers are affiliated with the company, it didn’t receive funding for the study.) Participants filled out an online questionnaire about their training habits, opinions about training benefits and which, if any, program they used. Some 1,009 participants reported using brain training programs for about eight months, on average, though durations ranged from two weeks to more than five years.
Next, the volunteers completed 12 cognitive tests assessing memory, reasoning and verbal skills. They faced Simon-like memory exercises, such spatial reasoning tasks as mentally rotating objects, pattern-finding puzzles and strategy challenges.
When researchers looked at the results, they saw that brain trainers on average had no mental edge over the other group in memory, verbal skills and reasoning. Even among the most dedicated, who had used training programs for at least 18 months, brain training didn’t boost thinking abilities above the level of people who didn’t use the programs.
That’s not because brain trainers have poorer function to start with and then improved. Participants who had trained for less than a month, and presumably wouldn’t have reaped significant benefits from the programs yet, performed on par with people who didn’t train at all.
“They put brain training to the test,” says Elizabeth Stine-Morrow, a cognitive aging scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While the study doesn’t show why brain trainers aren’t seeing benefits, it does show there is no link “between the amount of time spent with the brain training programs and cognition,” Stine-Morrow says. “That was pretty cool.”
The researchers recruited 8,563 volunteers globally through Cambridge Brain Sciences, a Toronto-based company that provides assessments to measure healthy brain function. (While several of the researchers are affiliated with the company, it didn’t receive funding for the study.) Participants filled out an online questionnaire about their training habits, opinions about training benefits and which, if any, program they used. Some 1,009 participants reported using brain training programs for about eight months, on average, though durations ranged from two weeks to more than five years.
Next, the volunteers completed 12 cognitive tests assessing memory, reasoning and verbal skills. They faced Simon-like memory exercises, such spatial reasoning tasks as mentally rotating objects, pattern-finding puzzles and strategy challenges.
When researchers looked at the results, they saw that brain trainers on average had no mental edge over the other group in memory, verbal skills and reasoning. Even among the most dedicated, who had used training programs for at least 18 months, brain training didn’t boost thinking abilities above the level of people who didn’t use the programs.
That’s not because brain trainers have poorer function to start with and then improved. Participants who had trained for less than a month, and presumably wouldn’t have reaped significant benefits from the programs yet, performed on par with people who didn’t train at all.
