On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 10:23 PM, Justin Shovelain
<
jshovelainsiai@gmail.com> wrote:
> Abstract:
> So-called 'brain-training' programs are a huge commercial success.
> However, empirical evidence regarding their effectiveness and
> generalizability remains equivocal. This study investigated whether
> brain-training (working memory [WM] training) improves cognitive
> functions beyond the training task (transfer effects), especially
> regarding the control of emotional material since it constitutes much
> of the information we process daily. Forty-five participants received
> WM training using either emotional or neutral material, or an
> undemanding control task. WM training, regardless of training
> material, led to transfer gains on another WM task and in fluid
> intelligence. However, only brain-training with emotional material
> yielded transferable gains to improved control over affective
> information on an emotional Stroop task. The data support the reality
> of transferable benefits of demanding WM training and suggest that
> transferable gains across to affective contexts require training with
> material congruent to those contexts. These findings constitute
> preliminary evidence that intensive cognitively demanding brain-
> training can improve not only our abstract problem-solving capacity,
> but also ameliorate cognitive control processes (e.g. decision-making)
> in our daily emotive environments.
>
> Source:
>
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024372Very cool. The emotional thing is nifty, of course, but the real value
for me is the IQ stuff.
The emotional aspect seems to be just replacing the 'neutral' existing
stimuli like colors or letters or piano keys with more loaded ones:
> The figure depicts a block of the emotional version of the dual n-back task (training task) where n = 1. The top row shows the sequence across trials (A, B, C, D, etc.) of visually presented stimuli in a 4×4 grid (the visual stimuli were presented on a standard 1280×1024 pixel computer display). A picture of a face appeared in one of the 16 possible grid positions on each trial. Simultaneously, with the presentation of these visual stimuli on the computer display, participants heard words over headphones (second row in the figure). Participants were required to indicate, by button press, whether the trial was a 'target trial' or not. Targets could be visual or auditory. In the example here, Trial C is a visual target. That is, the face in Trial C is presented in the same location as the face in Trial B (i.e., n = 1 positions back). Note, the faces are of different actors. For visual stimuli participants were asked to ignore the content of the image and solely attend to the location in which the images were presented. In the current example, Trial D was an auditory target trial because 'Evil' is the same word as the word presented in Trial C - n positions back (where n = 1). Each block consisted of 20+n trials.
(If you look at Figure 1, example stimuli words are dead, hate, evil,
rape, slum, and a picture of a very angry male face.)
The difference doesn't seem to change progress on n-back in either
group, which is good since if there were differences, that would be
troubling eg. if the affective n-back group didn't increase as many
levels, that would make any following results more dubious:
> Performance of the two n-back groups pre- to post- training did not differ significantly on either the neutral F(1, 27) = 1.02, P>0.05 or affective F (1, 27)<1 n-back tasks. Similarly, the control group showed a significantly greater pre- to post-training improvement on the feature match task they trained on, compared with the n-back groups F(1, 42) = 41.09, P<0.001, ηp2 = 0.67.
And as expected, both DNB groups increased WM:
> As predicted, participants in the training group showed a significant improvement on digit span F(1, 28) = 33.96, P<0.001, ηp2 = 0.55. However, this was not true of controls F(1, 15) = 1.89, P = 0.19, ηp2 = 0.11, and the gain was significantly greater in the training group participants compared to controls F(1,43) = 5.92, P = 0.02, ηp2 = 0.12.
The RPM scores are... a little troubling. The DNB groups gain ~1 point
(question), and the control group falls ~2 points after starting off
~2 points higher. In other words, if the control group had not fallen
so much, the DNB groups would at no point have scored higher! They
don't seem to think it's a problem, but even if the result stands,
it's certainly not impressive:
> Replicating their results, we found a significant gain in Gf scores in the training group over and above gains on the digit span task F(1, 26) = 3.00, P = 0.05, ηp2 = 0.10. In contrast, the control group showed a non-significant decrease in Gf, F<1, and the critical group by time interaction was significant, F(1, 40) = 7.47, P = 0.01, ηp2 = 0.16. As can be seen in Figure 3, there was a trend toward a significant group difference in Gf (RPM scores) at pre-training, p≤0.10. This raises the possibility that the relative gains in Gf in the training versus control groups may be to some extent an artefact of baseline differences. However, the interactive effect of transfer as a function of group remained significant even after more closely matching the training and control groups for pre-training RPM scores (by removing the highest scoring controls) F(1, 30) = 3.66, P = 0.032, ηp2 = 0.10. The adjusted means (standard deviations) for the control and training groups were now 27.20 (1.93), 26.63 (2.60) at pre-training (t(43) = 1.29, P>0.05) and 26.50 (4.50), 27.07 (2.16) at post-training, respectively. Moreover, there was a trend for the gain in Gf to be positively correlated with improvements in n-back performance across training r(29) = 0.36 at P = 0.057, suggesting that such gains were indeed a function of training....Although the Gf transferable gains we found appear to be somewhat related to training gains and the effects remain when we trim the groups to provide a better match for pre-training Gf, it is important to note that some degree of regression to the mean may be influencing the results.
FWIW, they don't mention administering the RPM in any speeded fashion:
> We assessed Gf with the Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM; [35]) – a standard measure in the literature. Each RPM item presented participants with a matrix of visual patterns with one pattern missing. The participant chose how the matrix should be completed by selecting a pattern from a series of alternatives. We used parallel versions of the RPM (even and uneven numbered pages), which we counterbalanced across participants and pre- and post-training. The RPM is scored on a scale from 0–30, with each correct matrix earning participants one point.
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net
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