By engaging in physical activity, you may keep your body in shape, but it is also important not to neglect your intellectual health. Your brain benefits from both physical and mental fitness improvements. Although your brain is technically an organ, it functions similarly to the other muscles in your body. Thus brain health should be a priority for everyone. That is, you will lose it if you don’t use it.
For long-term cognitive health, studies demonstrate that maintaining mental fitness is crucial; the challenge is figuring out the best way to accomplish it. As a result, there has been a recent increase in the popularity of brain games. Sudoku, crossword puzzles, and other brain-training games are used by people of all ages to enhance cognitive function and delay the brain’s aging process. However, it is unclear from studies which brain games are most effective (and for whom) and if they have a significant effect or function.
According to several sources, to evaluate the practical advantages of brain training, a broader perspective is needed that considers larger and more diverse samples, different training programs, and assessments of cognition changes using a common set of multiple outcome measures for each participant. This idea was used in a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. They recruited more than 11,000 participants from all over the world for their extensive online study, more than 1000 of whom indicated that they had been regular users of commercially available brain training programs for up to five years.
The largest real-world test of these programs was carried out by researchers from the University of Western Ontario to determine whether brain games improve brain function. They compared 7,500 people who don’t perform brief brain exercises to more than 1,000 people who routinely use brain trainers.
The researchers reasoned that, on average, 1009 persons with an active history of active brain training should outperform those without a history in some domains of general cognitive function if brain training results in generalizable increases in higher-level cognition.
Additionally, they anticipated a duration-dependent link between the quantity of brain training and performance on a range of outcome measures; the greater the benefit to cognitive functioning, the more brain training that individual receives.
There were two phases of the investigation. The first step was having participants fill out a questionnaire that included four questions about their usage of and attitudes toward brain training in addition to questions about demographic information:
Participants moved on to phase 2 after completing the questionnaire, where they took a battery of 12 cognitive tests. According to their investigation, the researchers found that there wasn’t much of a difference in the performance of the two groups on various measures of their ability to think, indicating that brain training doesn’t live up to its name.
In particular, they discovered that brain trainers, on average, did not outperform the control group in memory, verbal ability, or thinking. Brain training did not improve thinking skills above non-users, not even among the most devoted users who had used the programs for at least 18 months.
That isn’t because brain trainers initially perform less poorly and subsequently get better. Participants who had only been training for a few weeks and would have probably not yet seen a significant improvement from the programs outperformed those who had not trained.
No matter how they cut the data, the researchers concluded that they had been unable to uncover any proof that brain training was connected to cognitive abilities. This was true regardless of the participant’s age, program, level of education, or socioeconomic situation – they were all cognitively comparable to those who weren’t using the programs.
In conclusion, the researchers were unable to pinpoint a benefit of brain training, and this extensive online study suggests that, for both older and younger adults, regardless of the training program used, brain training has no discernible impact on cognitive functioning in the “real world” even after lengthy training periods.
The findings also demonstrated that, even when there is an expectation that brain training is effective and even when those expectations combine with training duration, this has no impact on cognition. The researchers also urge replication studies on how brain training affects cognitive performance to preregister and provide an estimate of the smallest effect size of interest (SESOI) for equivalence testing to further their findings.
Stojanoski, B., Wild, C. J., Battista, M. E., Nichols, E. S., & Owen, A. M. (2021). Brain training habits are not associated with generalized benefits to cognition: An online study of over 1000 “brain trainers”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(4), 729–738. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000773
