Why ‘brain-training’ games aren’t that smart
Spend enough time playing “braintraining” games, and you’ll get pretty good at games. But you won’t necessarily get better at anything else.
That’s the conclusion of an extensive review published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. A team of psychologists scoured the scientific literature for studies held up by brain-training proponents as evidence that the technique works — and found the research wanting.
Training tools enhanced performance on the tasks that they tested, which makes sense: spend enough time matching coloured cards or memorizing strings of letters, and you’ll start to get really good at matching colours and memorizing letters. But there is “little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance,” the authors write. They also argue that the studies used to promote brain-training tools had major problems with their design or analysis that make it impossible to draw any general conclusions from them.
“It’s disappointing that the evidence isn’t stronger,” Daniel Simons, an author of the article and a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told NPR.
“It would be really nice if you could play some games and have it radically change your cognitive abilities. But the studies don’t show that on objectively measured real-world outcomes.”
Brain-training programs have been controversial for years. Starting in the mid-2000s, a number of experiments suggested that astonishing cognitive improvements could be induced by simple training-game interventions.
One of the most high-profile studies, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, found that about four weeks of brain training dramatically improved young adults’ ability to solve problems they had never encountered before.
The big claim was that the technique could produce “vertical transfer” of cognitive skills — in other words, playing games would boost the brain’s ability to do more sophisticated tasks.
But other researchers have had trouble reproducing this work. In 2014, a coalition of 70 scientists published an open letter on the website of the Stanford Center on Longevity questioning whether there was any scientific evidence that training games actually improve general cognitive function.