Is it possible to boost your intelligence bytraining? We reviewed three decades ofresearch21 November 2017, by Giovanni Sala And Fernand Gobet

It will certainly make you better at doing sudoku. Credit:Nicola Keegan/Shutterstock

Scientists achieved astonishing results whentraining a student with a memory trainingprogramme in a landmark experiment in 1982.After 44 weeks of practice, the student, dubbedSF, expanded his ability to remember digits fromseven numbers to 82. However, this remarkableability did not extend beyond digits – they also triedwith consonants.

The study can be considered the beginning of cognitive training research, investigating howpractice in areas ranging from music to chess andpuzzles impacts our intelligence. So what's thestate of this research 35 years later – havescientists discovered any foolproof ways to makeus smarter? We reviewed the evidence to find out.

The topic of cognitive training is still verycontroversial, with scientists expressing opposingviews about its effectiveness. Enthusiastic claimsabout the effects of cognitive training programmesusually follow the publication of a singleexperiment reporting positive findings.

Much less attention is paid when a study reports

negative results. This phenomenon is quite commonin many areas of social and life sciences and oftenprovides a biased view of a particular researchfield. That is why systematic reviews such as oursare essential to rule out the risk of such bias.

Making sense of conflicting evidence

In a new paper, published in Current Directions inPsychological Science, we synthesise what thereviews say about several cognitive trainingprogrammes. Our main method was meta-analysis– that is, a set of statistical techniques forestimating the true overall effect of a treatment.

To begin with, music expertise has been associatedwith superior memory for music material (notes ona stave). Remarkably, music experts exhibit asuperior memory even when the musical material ismeaningless (random notes). In the same vein,musical aptitude predicts music skills such as pitchand chord discrimination.

However, music instruction does not seem to exertany true effect on skills outside of music. Indeed,our meta-analysis shows that engaging in musichas no impact on general measures of intelligence,when placebo effects are controlled for with activecontrol groups. Music training does not affect eithercognitive skills – fluid intelligence, memory,phonological processing, spatial ability and cognitive control – or academic achievement.These outcomes have been recently confirmed byother independent labs.

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Korean brain training exercise. Credit: wikipedia, CC BY-SA

The field of chess presents an analogous pattern offindings. Chess masters' exceptional memory forchess positions is renowned. However, to date,chess training appears to exert only a small effecton cognitive and academic skills. What's more,almost none of the studies reporting such effectsactually used a control group – suggesting that theresults were mainly due to placebos (such as beingexcited about a new activity).

Similar results have been observed in the field ofworking memory training. Working memory is acognitive system, related to short-term memory,that stores and manipulates the informationnecessary to solve complex cognitive tasks.Participants undergoing working memory trainingprogrammes systematically improve theirperformance in several working memory tasks.However, experimental groups consistently fail toshow any improvement over active controls in otherskills such as fluid intelligence, cognitive control oracademic achievement. These findings wereconfirmed in three independent meta-analysesabout children, adults, and the general population.

Video game training also fails to enhance cognitivefunction. In another recent meta-analysis, to bepublished in Psychological Bulletin, we show thatvideo game players outperform non-gamers on a

variety of cognitive tasks. However, when non-players take part in video game trainingexperiments, no appreciable effect is observed inany of the outcome measures. This suggests thevideo game players may just have been better atthose tasks to start with.

Another group of scientists also recently carried outa systematic review on general brain trainingprogrammes (often including puzzles, tasks anddrills). While the researchers reported some effects,they found an inverse relationship between the sizeof the effects and the quality of experimentaldesigns of training programmes. Put simply, whenthe experiment includes essential features such asactive control groups and large samples, thebenefits are very modest at best.

The problem with misinterpretation

A pervasive problem with cognitive training studiesis that improved performance in isolated cognitivetasks is often seen as a proof for cognitiveenhancement. This is a common misinterpretation.To provide solid evidence, it is necessary toinvestigate the effects of training programmes on "latent cognitive constructs" – the variablesunderlying the performance in a set of cognitivetasks.

For example, working memory skill is a cognitiveconstruct and can be measured by collecting datasuch as digit span. But if the training exerts anactual effect on the cognitive skill (construct) youshould see the effects on many different tasks andlatent factors – multiple measures of the samecognitive skill. And it is rare that these trainingprogrammes are set up to do that.

That means that, to date, cognitive trainingprogrammes do not even necessarily boost thosecognitive functions that the trained tasks aresupposed to involve. What is enhanced is just theability to perform the trained task and similar tasks.

Researchers and the general public should be fullyaware of the limits of benefits from training thebrain. However, these negative findings shouldn'tdiscourage us from searching for ways to boostintelligence and other skills. We do know that our

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cognition is extraordinarily malleable to training.What we need now is more promising pathways togeneral cognitive enhancement rather than domain-specific enhancement. Our best bet for achievingthat is probably by carrying out research on genetics and neuroscience.

This article was originally published on TheConversation. Read the original article.

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