Published April 15, 2013
It seems brain-training
games—online tests, quizzes, games, or flash cards designed to improve
attention, memory, creativity, and concentration—are everywhere. But do
they work? A recent study published in the journal PLoS ONE says … maybe not. (Learn about the brain.)
When researchers tested employees of the Australian
Taxation Office to see if brain games boosted their mental capabilities,
it turned out that workers who watched nature documentaries instead
fared better on tests measuring language skills (as well as quality of
life and self-esteem).
Cate Borness, a graduate researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney,Australia,
tested 135 Australian public-sector employees on their productivity,
stress, cognitive functions, and overall quality of life to get baseline
performance levels.
Then she and her colleagues randomly assigned them to
either a test group that underwent 16 weeks of short brain-training
sessions using Happy Neuron software, or a control group that spent 16
weeks watching short nature documentaries and answering brief questions
about them (to prove they'd watched the videos). The short clips were
taken from National Geographic’s video website.
Watch one of the documentaries, the Okavango Delta.
Members of the control group—the "active control"—were
assigned a task like watching the documentaries to ensure that any
benefits seen from the brain-training app weren't simply because the
control subjects were bored while the test subjects' brains were firing
on all cylinders.
Nature and Language
"We didn't find a huge impact in terms of the cognitive
training program," Borness said. But, oddly enough, the group that
watched the documentaries left the study with statistically significant
benefits.
The nature video group said that their stress had gone
down, their quality of life had increased, and—according to tests that
Borness and her colleagues gave both groups—their language skills had
improved. (Read “Beyond the Brain” in National Geographic magazine.)
That could be because the videos and short questionnaires
were language-based, Borness said. "You're listening to a video and then
answering questions about it."
The brain-training games, on the other hand, were designed
to improve multiple measures of intelligence and cognitive function;
only about 20 percent of the games emphasized language skills.
One such game involved users having to fit words into
boxes such that the last letter of a word was also the first letter of
another word. The language-game players did see a slight increase in
their language skills, but not nearly as much of an increase as the
video watchers.
In the paper, Borness speculates that this could be
because the games focused on language only a fifth of the time, with
other games dedicated to memory, attention, reasoning, and more. Yet
those games didn't produce any measurable effects in the test
population.
Brain games like these could still be useful for some
people, Borness said. "The product may be questionable in its efficacy,
[but] I think part of the problem is not doing enough of it to have an
effect." However, she added, "we haven't figured out what is 'enough.'"
Despite the results of the study, Borness says she herself
is still a user of brain-training games. "I think they're fun. I'm one
of those people who can't do nothing, so I get on my phone and play
games." (Check out National Geographic’s Brain Games.)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130410-brain-games-neuroscience-culture-science/
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