So, it looks like those brain-stimulating games may have had #include <hot.air> as part of their marketing source code. I know, it’s shocking – advertizing claims might be divorced from reality! But, unfortunately for the creative minds behind the brain-training game industry, a recent study of the field suggests that they’re not actually making folks smarter.
Modest effects have been reported in some studies of older individuals and preschool children, and video-game players outperform non-players on some tests of visual attention. However, the widely held belief that commercially available computerized brain-training programs improve general cognitive function in the wider population in our opinion lacks empirical support. The central question is not whether performance on cognitive tests can be improved by training, but rather, whether those benefits transfer to other untrained tasks or lead to any general improvement in the level of cognitive functioning. Here we report the results of a six-week online study in which 11,430 participants trained several times each week on cognitive tasks…. Although improvements were observed in every one of the cognitive tasks that were trained, no evidence was found for transfer effects to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related.
- Adrian M. Owen, et al
However, all is not gloom, doom, and more money to spend on power-leveling services new sneakers.
The first thing to be mindful of is that the participants were only asked (not required) to play the various training games for a minimum of ten minutes a day, six days a week. It’s hardly surprising, then, to notice that this extremely limited exposure would have modest results; that’s barely even enough time to get a decent workout, even if you don’t include warming up and cooling down. Various studies on expertise have said that a high degree of proficiency will take hundreds, if not thousands of hours to attain. At an hour a week, the subjects of this study would literally take years to get to even the barest minimum threshold for aptitude. Compare that to someone who, in the service of developing a hobby or interest, spends a couple of hours most nights working on it – in that same year’s time, instead of fifty hours’ experience, they’ll have five hundred or more. (A conventional, full-time day job is two thousand hours a year.) So, yeah, it’s not exactly earth-shattering to learn that folks with under ten hours’ study time won’t have super-awesome mental powers of amazingness.
Getting good at anything takes time, and that applies to not just the games we play, but the way we think about food, and how we exercise. Nobody gets out of shape or overweight overnight, and we can’t correct those issues overnight, either. Mike’s talked about the long road he’s been on to lose weight; mine has been shorter, but still far from instant. When you’re just getting acquainted with a new diet or exercise routine, you won’t know everything, and it’s completely normal to feel a little clueless and awkward, just as you would when you picked up your first pencil-and-paper RPG or first-person shooter. But with a little perseverance, you’ll get the hang of it, just as we have, and those milestones and progress markers will start to fall.
Take another look at that quote, which came from from the introduction to Owens’ paper – “video-game players outperform non-players on some tests of visual attention.” Sweet! Why? Because we’ve spent years, and in some cases, decades, engaged in gaming activities that require and reward fast response to visual clues – monsters coming around corners, teammates breaking into the open, or finally getting that frigging straight piece in Tetris we’ve been waiting for forever. It may not be quite as awesome as receiving total consciousness just before we die, but, hey, we’ve got that going for us.
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