Cognitive Training

Two main findings emerge with research into the efficacy of cognitive training.

1. Training helps. Training improves behavioral performance in the task that people are trained in. This is evidenced in the Seattle Longitudinal Study and the Berlin Aging Study as studied by Baltes, Willis, Schaie, Lindenberger from the 70s to 90s, and even current day. Mostly, these studies train people in tasks involving spatial orientation and inductive reasoning. And they show that training in these specific domains leads to improvements post-test in that domain. This might explain why expertise exists. That is, why there are people around who are very good at what they do because they have so much experience doing it.

2. Training does not spill over to other domains as much. To be fair, there are some general transfers of learning, mostly within other tests that probe that trained domain. But across different domains, there seems to be not much transfer. Many have tried to investigate if training serves to improve general intelligence, and thus would logically lead to more transfer, since it is general. However, this has proven elusive. Most of the problem is because general intelligence itself is elusive, and is really still very much a modular thing. That is, there may not be a general intelligence at all, but specialties in cognitive abilities like spatial orientation, inductive reasoning, perceptual speed etc.

3. Perceptual speed does not improve with training. This is the general finding. However, not finding improvement with training does not mean that it is not possible. Perhaps there is a method of improving perceptual speed, but we have not found it yet.

4. These improvements with training are found even in aging!