New Study Shows Brain Training Programmes Not Associated With Benefits of Cognition
The study also found that the duration for which a human remained committed to these brain-training programmes. By Edited by Gadgets 360 Newsdesk | Updated: 31 May 2021 15:20 IST
The study into cognitive function compared 8,500 diverse people
Highlights
They found that brain trainers had no real impact on cognitive function
The study compared 1,000 testers with 7,500 other people
No, brain training games do not make you smarter. A new study looked into the phenomenon and it has bad news for people who want to say that their games make them any smarter than the people who would rather be playing Candy Crush. From computer games to crosswords to Sudoku, people think these games would sharpen their mental abilities. Not to forget, there is this urge to enhance our cognitive abilities to such a degree that it has, according to some estimates, driven a billion-d
Brain Training Games Have Zero Actual Impact on IQ
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In sad news for brain-builders out there relying on “training” games, a new study in
The Journal of Experimental Psychology says playtime has no impact whatsoever on intelligence. The study’s authors recruited 1,009 participants and found no differences in cognitive abilities between those who play the training games and those who don’t. Even the hardcore trainers with up to five years of experience were no better off than newbies.
Science News reported on the new study, led by Bobby Stojanoski, a cognitive neuroscientist at Western University in Ontario. Stojanoski and his colleagues say they executed the study to test the notion that computer games enhance cognitive capacity; a notion, they note, that is “both intuitive and appealing.”
May 25, 2021 at 11:00 am
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.
“For every study that finds some evidence, there’s an equal number of papers that find no evidence,” says Bobby Stojanoski, a cognitive neuroscientist at Western University in Ontario (
SN: 3/8/17;
SN: 5/9/17).
Now, in perhaps the biggest real-world test of these programs, Stojanoski and colleagues pitted more than 1,000 people who regularly use brain trainers against around 7,500 people who don’t do the mini brain workouts. There was little difference between how both groups performed on a series of tests of their thinking abilities, suggesting that brain training doesn’t live up to its name, the scientists report in the April