Some Psychological Facts on Brain Games
Do Brain Games Increase IQ or Short-Term Memory.
New research says that Brain Games Seem to Improve
Short-Term Memory, Not IQ
Brain Games Seem to Improve Short-Term Memory, Not IQ While
new methods to purportedly sharpen our mental abilities are found in brain
training games, apps and websites, a central question is “do they work?”
New research suggests that brain training programs might
strengthen your ability to hold information in mind, but they won’t bring any
benefits to the kind of intelligence that helps you reason and solve problems.
The
findings are published in Psychological Science.
“It is hard to spend any time on the web and not see an ad
for a website that promises to train your brain, fix your attention, and
increase your IQ,” said lead researcher Randall Engle, Ph.D., of Georgia
Institute of Technology.
“These claims are particularly attractive to parents of children
who are struggling in school.”
Engle and other are concerned that the advertisement mislead
parents and other consumers.
According to Engle, the claims are based on evidence that
shows a strong correlation between working memory capacity (WMC) and general
fluid intelligence.
Working memory capacity refers to our ability to keep
information either in mind or quickly retrievable, particularly in the presence
of distraction. General fluid intelligence is the ability to infer
relationships, do complex reasoning, and solve novel problems.
The correlation between WMC and fluid intelligence has led
some to surmise that increasing WMC should lead to an increase in both fluid
intelligence, but “this assumes that the two constructs are the same thing, or
that WMC is the basis for fluid intelligence,” Engle said.
In an experiment to validate the relationship between these
two aspects of cognition, Engle and colleagues had 55 undergraduate students
complete 20 days of training on certain cognitive tasks.
The students were paid extra for improving their performance
each day to ensure that they were engaged in the training.
Students in the two experimental conditions trained on
either complex span tasks, which have been consistently shown to be good
measures of WMC, or simple span tasks.
With the simple span tasks, the students were asked to
recall items in the order they were presented; for complex span tasks, the
students had to remember items while performing another task in between item
presentations. A control group trained on a visual search task that, like the
other tasks, became progressively harder each day.
The researchers administered a battery of tests before and
after training to gauge improvement and transfer of learning, including a
variety of WMC measures and three measures of fluid intelligence.
The results were clear: Only students who trained on complex
span tasks showed transfer to other WMC tasks. None of the groups showed any
training benefit on measures of fluid intelligence.
“For over 100 years, psychologists have argued that general
memory ability cannot be improved, that there is little or no generalization of
‘trained’ tasks to ‘untrained’ tasks,” said Tyler Harrison, graduate student
and lead author of the paper.
“So we were surprised to see evidence that new and untrained
measures of working memory capacity may be improved with training on complex
span tasks.”
The results suggest that the students improved in their
ability to update and maintain information on multiple tasks as they switched
between them, which could have important implications for real-world
multitasking:
“This work affects nearly everyone living in the complex
modern world,” said Harrison, “but it particularly affects individuals that
find themselves trying to do multiple tasks or rapidly switching between
complex tasks, such as driving and talking on a cell phone, alternating between
conversations with two different people, or cooking dinner and dealing with a
crying child.”
Despite the potential boost for multitasking, the benefits
of training didn’t transfer to fluid intelligence. Engle points out that just
because WMC and fluid intelligence are highly correlated doesn’t mean that they
are the same:
“Height and weight in human beings are also strongly correlated
but few reasonable people would assume that height and weight are the same
variable,” said Engle.
“If they were, gaining weight would make you taller and
losing weight would make you shorter — those of us who gain and lose weight
periodically can attest to the fact that that is not true.”
While the debate continues, the investigators plan to
continue this research to better understand how training specific aspects of
cognition can lead to positive transfer to other tasks, both in the lab and in
the real world.
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