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When Cognitive Games Do Make You Smarter

When Cognitive Games Do Make You Smarter

by | 2022 Jun 30 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

cognitive game

Cognitive games have been around for many years now – the first wave of popularity came with Nintendo’s “brain jogging” almost two decades ago now.

These games have claimed that they improve brain function and indeed there has been some solid research to show this does happen. But when digging into the research an inconsistent picture emerges.

The sticking point is what we call near and far transfer. If you train anything you will get better at it – that is no surprise, but the question is how far can this transfer to real life? So, if you are playing any form of cognitive game such as a short-term memory game, the really important question is how much does this transfer to everyday life, i.e. will my memory be improved when meeting people or going shopping?

It is precisely this that has shown inconsistent results. And it is precisely this that a group of researchers at the University of California wanted to get a better grip on.

What did they find?

They conducted a series of experiments with 500 individuals and found consistent results. They found that the degree of near transfer predicated far transfer.

Near transfer is doing similar but different tasks whereas far transfer transfers to less related tasks. For example, if I were training running on a treadmill, near transfer would be improving my road running performance (similar but not exactly the same), and far transfer would be improving my tennis or cycling ability (related but very different).

So, it appears that once transfer happens, it can happen also to more unrelated tasks. The question they would now like to answer is why? One reason is that people may by applying different skills to complete the task which don’t transfer or are unable to generalise the skills, or another factor may be that there is another bottleneck. In the above treadmill running eample, improved cardiovascular fitness may improve most sports, but in tennis coordination may be the bottleneck that impedes my improvement, and this is not trained on the treadmill.

I found this particularly interesting because I have followed the research over the years but also because one skill, I have found to be useful and different between individuals, in training and coaching executives, is that some of these senior leaders seem very good at generalising and applying various principles to different scenarios and others can’t seem ot do so. Maybe it is the difference between a generalised brain and a specialised brain?

The researchers are looking for participants, by the way, to do a large-scale citizen study with up to 30’000 participants to give us some robust answers to the mechanism of near and far transfer.

I look forward to seeing the results!

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Anja Pahor, Aaron R. Seitz, Susanne M. Jaeggi. 
Near transfer to an unrelated N-back task mediates the effect of N-back working memory training on matrix reasoning. 
Nature Human Behaviour, 2022
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01384-w

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How Walking Makes Some People “Super Taskers”

How Walking Makes Some People “Super Taskers”

by | 2022 Jun 29 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

brain walking performance

Those of you who have followed my writing will know that I have reported regularly on the amazing benefits of exercise and walking on the brain, body, and cognition.

However, though we know that walking can stimulate various cognitive functions, we also know that doing multiple complex or demanding tasks together reduces performance. So, walking helps stimulate creativity and improves cognitive performance – normally after walking, while walking, performance on cognitive tasks decreases. Which is often why when you really need to think something through you automatically stop or pause.

This is all in line with what we know of cognitive and brain functioning. However, some researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Centre have just published a paper with some surprising results.

What did they find?

26 healthy 18-30-year-olds did a series of tasks. First they did a response task to images of pictures while sitting. This was considered their “baseline” performance level. They then conducted the same task while walking on a treadmill. Almost all previous research showed that performance decreases. This was the case in 12 participants, however, in 14 participants performance increased!

All participants had EEG recordings of their brain activity – and they found that in these 14 prefrontal activity (associated with cognitive performance) in the brain increased during walking tasks leading to higher performance. However, before you get too excited there was no way to predict this from any other data or even observing them.

This suggests that in some people in this study more than 50% of people improve performance on cognitive tasks while walking. Which if we learn to predict this could lead to more effective strategies for cognitive performance for these people.

It could also be that these people also intuitively do tasks that boost their performance. But beware – the research on multitasking is still clear: the more tasks you do concurrently, the lower the performance, the more mistakes you make, and the slower you are. It also compares a highly automated task, walking with a cognitive task, not two cognitive tasks. So, no free card on multi-tasking here.

Single tasking, is still the best advice I can give to boost performance●

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Eleni Patelaki, John J Foxe, Kevin A Mazurek, Edward G Freedman. 
Young adults who improve performance during dual-task walking show more flexible reallocation of cognitive resources: a mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI) study. 
Cerebral Cortex, 2022
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhac227

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Older People are Better at Responding to Distress

Older People are Better at Responding to Distress

by | 2022 Jun 28 | Public, Quick Hits

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Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

ageing brain

We may have some cliched ideas of older people like the grumpy or angry old man, or woman (but it is often a man).

However, research continually shows the opposite. Namely that people tend to mellow out with age. And another piece of research published in March this year also shows that older people respond better to distress. This is an interesting piece conducted by Sussanne Schweizer of the University of South Wales in Australia.

What did they do?

249 participants aged between 18 and 88 watched a series of clips with emotional content. This varied form positive such as babies giggling, to neutral such as a weather forecast, or negative, such as footage of the Rwandan genocide.  They were asked to watch these and allow any emotional responses to arise naturally. However, they were then instructed to actively reframe 50% of the negative content clips and try to put this in a more positive light.

They then rated their emotional responses to each of the clips.

What did they find?

They found that older people were

    1. More positive to positive emotional stimuli
    2. More positive to neutral emotional stimuli
    3. Better able to manage negative emotional stimuli

These even though the so-called basal emotional state was rated as more negative (this is the grumpy old man syndrome!). The basal state is the general state. So older people seem to be slightly more negative “at rest”.

Subsequent brain scanning of some of the participants failed to find any fundamental differences in brain structure apart from decreased cortical thickness across all regions which we know is a natural part of the ageing process.

So, all in it shows that older people respond more positively to all emotional stimuli but importantly are better able to deal with distressing or negative stimuli.

Surprising? Maybe.

In summary, in negative situations it might be good to have an old person with you!

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Stretton, J., Schweizer, S., & Dalgleish, T. (2022).
Age-Related Enhancements in Positive Emotionality across The Life Span: Structural Equation Modeling of Brain and Behavior.
The Journal of Neuroscience : The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 42(16).
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1453-21.2022

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Guided Play Highly Effective for Learning in Children

Guided Play Highly Effective for Learning in Children

by | 2022 Jun 27 | Public, Quick Hits

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Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

play learning brain

Good news for some and bad news for traditionalists in education.

Some believe that starting education early and using classical and traditional learning activities is the best way to develop children and their brains. Though we do know that early education can be surprisingly important – as I reported here with results seen in the brain up to 40 years later – but we also know that things like simply playing can be beneficial to children.

This is because play in itself uses multiple cognitive resource and often in complex ways and so can be more than beneficial than some schooling approaches. This is in contrast to passive activities such as watching television or engaging in most of social media.

This review out of the University of Cambridge looked at a total of 39 studies including over 3’800 children between three and eight and asked the question of whether guided play could be as effective as traditional approaches to learning. Guided play allows children to engage in playful activities but are guided and prompted by the teacher in certain directions.

What was the result?

The results were positive – very positive. Remember this was a large-scale analysis and they also measured comparative effects by consolidating results from multiple other studies.  This was then translated into a relative effect.

In maths ability there was a small comparative positive effect. This shows that guided play was generally more effective than traditional methods and in other areas, shape knowledge, for example, the effect was much larger. There was also evidence that guided play improved the cognitive ability to switch between tasks.

All in that is already a very good result showing that guided play was more effective on average than traditional instruction. But the authors also note multiple other benefits that guided play may include but weren’t measured directly in this study. This includes motivation, persistence, creativity, and confidence. All in that paints a very positive picture for the use of guided play!

So what are you, or rather parents, teachers, and educational authorities, waiting for?

And what about in adults? I suspect I already know the answer to that!

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Kayleigh Skene, Christine M. O’Farrelly, Elizabeth M. Byrne, Natalie Kirby, Eloise C. Stevens, Paul G. Ramchandani. 
Can guidance during play enhance children’s learning and development in educational contexts? A systematic review and meta-analysis. 
Child Development, 2022;
DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13730

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Childhood Fitness Improves Mid-Life Cognition

Childhood Fitness Improves Mid-Life Cognition

by | 2022 Jun 23 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

children exercise brain health

I always find these long-term studies fascinating. Imagine launching study and not knowing what the outcomes will be for another 30 years!

This is precisely what this study did. It measured children in 1985 and now the researchers at the Monash University in Australia have analysed the data over a 30-year period.

What did they find?

Well, as the title suggest it found some interesting correlations. 1’200 children between the ages of 7 and 15 were measured on various aspects of fitness: fitness (cardiorespiratory, muscular power, muscular endurance). In addition, their obesity, or rather thier waist-to-hip ratio, was measured.

There was then follow up assessments on psychomotor speed-attention, and various cognitive functions at three different time points.

They found that higher physical fitness and lower obesity in childhood had better scores on processing speed and attention, as well as in global cognitive function. Of note is that cognitive functions in mid-life are also associated with risk of dementia in later life.

This shows that fitness as a child leaves life-lasting benefits. This is not the only study to note this I have also reported on the healthier brains and better brain circuits that seem to last a lifetime in children who exercise.

So, if you have kids – make sure they get their exercises. If you are a kid get some exercise. If you are already an adult – well, you might not reap the full benefits of childhood exercise, but exercise is still very good for many things as I reviewed here, and even the simplest exercise of all, walking, has amazing benefits●

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Jamie L. Tait, Taya A. Collyer, Seana L. Gall, Costan G. Magnussen, Alison J. Venn, Terence Dwyer, Brooklyn J. Fraser, Chris Moran, Velandai K. Srikanth, Michele L. Callisaya. 
Longitudinal associations of childhood fitness and obesity profiles with midlife cognitive function: an Australian cohort study.
 Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 2022
DOI: 10.1016/j.jsams.2022.05.009

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