Brain training is a growing and exciting new area in scientific research. In particular, there is a lot of evidence of the brain’s plasticity: that it can actually change-shrink or grow-depending on what we do. I wanted to investigate whether students with learning disabilities can also benefit from brain training.
I recently completed a study together with Dyslexia Scotland and the Autistic Treatment Trust on the impact of brain training. A group of students aged between 8 to 16 years old took part. They completed some tests of IQ and working memory and then participated in an 8-week training programme called Jungle Memory.
The findings were very exciting! The students who used the Jungle Memory training programme regularly (4x a week for 30 minutes) had higher IQ and working memory scores, compared to those who only trained 1x a week and those who didn’t train at all. By training your brain you will be able to improve your child’s prospects in classroom and beyond.
If you would like further details on this study, please contact me.
Here is a link to an article on my research that appeared in the Sunday Post, UK.
A group of psychologists in London* were interested in the brains of taxi drivers. In particular, they wanted to know whether their visual-spatial memory was better than the rest of us.
There are many reasons why this would be the case. For starters, directions are taxi drivers’ lifeblood - they need to know their way inside and out of a city like London. They also have to take an extensive test called the Knowledge which requires drivers to know over 400 routes. It is such a demanding course that 75% of people drop out. Yet, there are fantastic gains for those who do stick with it. Of course, there is a financial incentive - drivers stand to make significantly more money once passing the test.
However, there is a surprise bonus as the psychologists discovered: taxi drivers have bigger brains! Yes, it is true. The part of brain associated with directions (visual-spatial memory) is actually larger is experienced taxi drivers compared to the average individual. The brain changes to accommodate the increasingly amount of information on navigating and directions that taxi drivers have to take in.
This is an exciting study because it demonstrates that our brain has a certain amount of flexibility and can expand in response to certain information. Previously, psychologists found brain changes only in patients who had sustained a brain injury, but in the case of the taxi drivers we see that all of us can benefit from working our memory muscles.
From TRAINING YOUR BRAIN for Dummies (due Dec 2010)
*E. Maguire et al. (2000) Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Is technology impairing our working memory? From our ever-increasing reliance on word processing to help us improve grammar, Blackberries to remind us of appointments, speed-dial so we don’t have to remember phone numbers and a universe of information available at the click of a mouse. What is the trade-off: what we do give up when we rely on new technology? Are the likes of Facebook and YouTube reducing our ability to engage in everyday life? In fact, the opposite may be true; technology can dramatically improve our working memory.
Facebook one of the most popular social networking sites with more than 300 million active users. Apart from the novelty of connecting with people you haven’t seen since you were 5 years old (for better or for worse!), it can also promote a sense of social connectedness. Those who are cut off from others often become isolated and may miss out on many benefits within education and employment. Studies on elderly populations found that those who spent more time meeting up with friends or talking on the phone experience less memory loss than their peers who were more isolated.
Technology is advancing quickly and more and more students use social networking sites. But what impact does this have on education? Can virtual social connections boost working memory? I looked at these questions in a recent study. A group of high-schoolers filled in a questionnaire about how long they spent using social networking sites, such as Facebook. I also measured their IQ, working memory, and academic attainment. I found that those who used Facebook more regularly (1x a day) had better working memory scores, as well as higher spelling and vocabulary. The sense of belonging and social connectedness that we feel when using social networking sites such as Facebook, releases a feel-good hormone, which bolsters our working memory. Good news for schools who are integrating social networking sites into their programs.
TRY IT FOR YOURSELF
I was recently invited to share my research on BBC Radio. Here are some details on the programme from the BBC website:
IQ TESTING
IQ testing has long been a controversial way of measuring intelligence, but now there are claims that there’s another, more accurate method of predicting academic success: working memory, or the capacity we have to learn. Dr Tracy Alloway, whose recent experiments showed that testing working memory predicted children’s grades more accurately than traditional IQ, speaks up for working memory. LISTEN
There is exciting research emerging on the benefit of brain training. The question is: what works? Is it enough to memorize numbers in backwards order? Previous research outlines programs where students remember number sequences for a few weeks. Although improvements in working memory were reported, there are clear limitations. Most notably, there was no transfer effect: training working memory did not improve academic attainment. This leads to the possibility that some brain training programs are just ‘training for the test’, which means you are just getting better at playing the training games.
In order to address this issue, I recently conducted a clinical trial with two groups of students: the Training group participated in a working memory training program (www.JungleMemory.com) and the Control group received targeted educational support (IEP). The two groups did not differ in their IQ, working memory, or academic scores pre-training.
Both the Training and the Control groups underwent 8-weeks of their respective training programs and then were retested on the IQ, working memory, and academic tests.
The results were dramatic. The Control group did not perform much better without intervention, and in some instances they performed even worse in math and working memory.
In contrast, the Training group demonstrated a clear improvement not only in IQ and working memory tests, but crucially in learning outcomes as well. Students on the working memory training program went from a C to a B, or a B to an A after just 8 weeks of training! This is an exciting step in demonstrating that the right brain training can significantly boost academic attainment.
The WISC is a standardized assessment of cognitive abilities in children aged 6 to 16 years and revised versions include the Working Memory Index.
DIGIT SPAN
The Digit Span test is a highly validated method of measuring aspects of working memory capacity, and is fast and reliable to administer. However, the method of combining forward digit span with backward digit span scores conflates verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory. This can artificially raise a student’s working memory score as they may do well on the forward digit span subtest, yet struggle in the backward digit span subtest.
LETTER-NUMBER SEQUENCING
This subtest draws heavily on the student’s knowledge of basic number skills and the alphabet. Students may perform poorly on this subtest, not because they have working memory problems, but because they struggle in remembering the alphabet or numbers in the correct sequence.
ARITHMETIC
The supplementary test, arithmetic, can also be calculated into the Working Memory Index. However, it is not clear that this test genuinely provides a direct measure of working memory measure, although it certainly would be expected that children with poor working memory would be slow to develop the necessary mathematical knowledge to support good levels of performance on this test. It is therefore not recommended that arithmetic test scores are interpreted as direct assessments of working memory.
There are other limitations to the Working Memory Index. One practical drawback is that the WISC-IV is cannot be used with children below 6 years. Another is the heavy reliance on verbal information. This raises the possibility that a student who has particular problems in handling verbal information mentally may perform at low levels on these tests simply because of the format of the material, and not because of working memory problems. For example, students who fail to develop language struggle greatly on these kinds of memory test that involve spoken language, but perform at entirely normal levels when the information that is being remembered is non-verbal - such as remembering a pattern in a grid or the location of an object on a screen. So although these children have substantial working memory problems, they are probably secondary rather than primary in nature, and they also have working memory strengths that would be undetected by administration of the WISC-IV.
Read more in Working memory and learning: A practical guide
We have all heard it before: the brain is a muscle and we need to exercise it. But is all mental exercise equal?
Before you spend your time and money, there are two important questions you need to ask yourself about the evidence of a brain training product.
1. Are you just getting better at the game?
Let’s say you play PacMan every day for a month. Sure, you’ll have a better score than when you first started out, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve actually trained your brain. All you’ve done is just improve your score in PacMan. A better assessment of whether the game is actually training your brain is to use a ‘benchmark’ test to measure improvement. For example, some psychologists test IQ before and after using a brain training game. If IQ improves, you can reasonably attribute this to playing the training program (presuming all other factors remain constant). I’ve looked at the benefits of Brain Gym*. Their claim is that it improves learning. However, when I looked at reading and math scores before and after using Brain Gym for 13 weeks, there was no improvement.
This leads us to the second question you need to ask yourself:
2. Is my improvement better than someone playing a non brain training game?
It is crucial to have a ‘control’ group. Ideally the control group should be doing something other than brain training. For example, if you want to investigate the benefits of brain training compared to doing crosswords, then the control group should do crosswords for the same amount of time as the group using the brain training program. This allows psychologists to accurately compare the results from the two groups and see if any improvements genuinely reflect the brain training program. In education, one school tried out a brain training program and suggested that learning improved. However, without a control group, we don’t know if this is because the students simply liked playing computer games instead of sitting in a classroom.
*Alloway & Warner (2008) Perceptual & Motor Skills READ
Here is some information on my talk at the British Science Festival on Sunday, September 6, 12pm. If you will be attending the Festival, stop by and say hello. MORE INFO
The new IQ- working memory
We are on the cusp of a new scientific revolution in understanding how the brain works. Working memory, our ability to remember and manipulate information, is at the centre of this revolution. Brain training is a growing and exciting new area in scientific research. In particular, there is a lot of evidence of our brain’s plasticity: that it can actually change ”shrink or grow” depending on what we do. Discover how the brain responds to training and the best brain training tools for adults and children. See how by training your brain, you will be able to improve your prospects in classroom and in the workplace.
