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Does brain training work? What the research shows, and what it does not

Research consistently shows that you get better at the task you practice. In well-designed studies that gain rarely carries over to tasks outside the training, and that carry-over is what the advertising promises. In January 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission settled with the maker of Lumosity over exactly those claims.

By the Skillido editorial team. Published on .

We sell a brain test and a practice report, so part of the answer below works against us. We write it down anyway, with the sources underneath, because otherwise you only have our word for it. Below you find what the largest studies measured, why a regulator stepped in, why researchers who read the same papers still disagree, and what we say on this site as a result. If you finish reading and decide to buy nothing, you have understood the article.

Why the FTC settled with Lumosity in 2016

On January 5, 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Lumos Labs, the company behind Lumosity. The press release is titled Lumosity to Pay $2 Million to Settle FTC Deceptive Advertising Charges for Its “Brain Training” Program. The court entered a judgment of 50 million dollars, suspended once the company paid 2 million dollars for refunds to customers.

The complaint named three kinds of advertising claims the company could not back up: that playing would improve performance on everyday tasks, in school, at work and in athletics; that it would hold off the changes that come at a later age; and that it would reduce the effects of certain health conditions. The FTC also found that some of the user testimonials on the site had been collected through contests, with a free iPad, a lifetime subscription and a round trip to San Francisco as prizes, and that visitors were never told.

Read carefully what the agency ruled and what it did not. Whether the games do anything at all was never the question before the FTC. The question was whether the company had evidence for what its ads promised, and it did not. The order requires Lumos Labs to have competent and reliable scientific evidence before it makes any future claim about real-world performance.

Near transfer and far transfer

Researchers in this field talk about transfer. Near transfer means you get better at tasks that closely resemble what you practiced. Far transfer means the gain turns up somewhere else, away from the screen, in a situation you never trained for.

Near transfer has never been in dispute. Practice a memory grid for six weeks and you will remember longer sequences on that grid. The commercial promise of this whole market sits in far transfer, and that is where the studies turn thin.

What the largest studies found

The best-known study is by Adrian Owen and colleagues, published in Nature in 2010 as Putting brain training to the test. Together with the BBC they had people train online for six weeks; 11,430 participants completed the whole program. People improved on every task they trained. The authors found no evidence of transfer to tasks they had not trained, even when those tasks were closely related.

In 2016 a group of seven researchers led by Daniel Simons published Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work? in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, an 84-page review of the published studies. Their summary runs in four steps. There is extensive evidence that these programs improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence for closely related tasks, little evidence for distantly related tasks, and little evidence that training improves everyday performance. Each step away from the trained task, the evidence gets weaker.

Simons and his co-authors also explain why so many smaller studies report an effect. A study that compares people who trained with people who did nothing cannot separate the training from the attention, the expectation and the routine that came with it. Studies with an active comparison group, where the other half also did something demanding, tend to find less.

Why scientists who read the same papers disagree

On October 20, 2014 the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin published a joint statement signed by a long list of researchers. Their conclusion was that claims promoting brain games are frequently exaggerated and at times misleading, and that there is little evidence that playing them improves broad underlying abilities.

A response letter followed, signed by what its publishers describe as well over 100 neuroscientists, psychologists and other experts, collected on the site Cognitive Training Data. Their worry was that readers would take the Stanford statement to mean there is no peer-reviewed evidence at all that any exercise has ever produced a gain.

Two statements, two long signature lists, opposite conclusions. The two camps mean different things by the word work. One side measures commercial products against far transfer. The other side counts any targeted training with any outcome measure. Ask the question differently and you get a different answer, and both answers can be given in good faith.

What holds up across the research

Plenty survives, just not the part the advertising is about. These findings return in almost every review.

  • You get better at the task you practice. This is the most repeated result in the field and nobody seriously doubts it.
  • The gain stays close to the practiced task. The further the outcome measure is from the training, the smaller the effect that is found.
  • The stricter the design, the smaller the effect. Studies with an active comparison group find less than studies without one.
  • A promise about everyday life, work or a later age needs evidence from a study with people, and in 2016 a US regulator wrote that requirement into a court order.

What this means for what Skillido says

Our free Brain Check is five games of 45 seconds each. Every game gives a game score from 0 to 100, and the average of the five is your Brain Check score. We set the scale for each game ourselves, based on what can be reached in that game, so that 50 is an ordinary round. Once 50 people have completed the Brain Check, a percentile appears next to your score, set against the other players on this site. How the scale is built is on the facts page.

That score says how you played these five games today. It is a game score, and we say nothing about what it means for your work, your studies or your life at a later age, because the research above gives us nothing to say it with. The one thing we do say is the finding every review agrees on. Play these games for a month and you will get better at these games. Whether you enjoy that is the only question that matters before you buy anything.

In Ireland, Malta and the Netherlands we sell a Brain Check report for €9.95. It holds your score on all five games, a percentile per game once there are enough players for that, your strongest and lowest game of the day, a comparison with your own earlier Brain Checks, and a thirty-day practice schedule as text. That is the whole list, and there is on purpose nothing in it about what the schedule does for you outside the games. If a new trial with an active comparison group shows a lasting gain beyond the trained tasks, we will update this page and put the date of that change on it.

Sources

Who wrote this

This article was written by the Skillido editorial team. Skillido is a product of Next Day Online B.V. in Wilp, the Netherlands, registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce under number 08198136. We sell brain training ourselves, and you may want to weigh that as you read.

If something here is wrong, write to hallo@skillido.com and a person will correct the text.

Written by the Skillido editorial team. Published on .

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Does brain training work? What the research shows, and what it does not | Skillido