MRI Predictors of Cognitive Training Outcomes

Abstract

The prospect of improving or maintaining cognitive functioning has provoked a steadily increasing number of cognitive training interventions over the last years, especially for clinical and elderly populations. However, there are discrepancies between the findings of the studies. One of the reasons behind these heterogeneous findings is that there are vast inter-individual differences in how people benefit from the training and in the extent that training-related gains are transferred to other untrained tasks and domains. In this paper, we address the value of incorporating neural measures to cognitive training studies in order to fully understand the mechanisms leading to inter-individual differences in training gains and their generalizability to other tasks. Our perspective is that it is necessary to collect multimodal neural measures in the pre- and post-training phase, which can enable us to understand the factors contributing to successful training outcomes. More importantly, this understanding can enable us to predict who will benefit from different types of interventions, thereby allowing the development of individually tailored intervention programs.

Cognitive Training with Neurofeedback Using NIRS Improved Cognitive Functions in Young Adults: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

“…A recent study indicated that brain activity during CT would be a key factor in enhancing the beneficial effects of CT [ 8 ]. Previous CT studies have reported that brain activity during training tasks at baseline was positively associated with cognitive benefits from CT [ 4 , 9 ].…”

Neuroanatomical predictors of complex skill acquisition during video game training

“…A recent review of literature on cognitive enhancement investigated predictors in a wide array of contexts, such as simple laboratory tasks, such as the multitask paradigm (Verghese et al, 2016), complex VG interventions (Erickson et al, 2010;Basak et al, 2011;Ray et al, 2017) and other cognitive training tasks, for instance math training (Supekar et al, 2013), scientific lecture attendance and take-home assignments (de Lange et al, 2016;Baykara et al, 2020). However, as was shown at the beginning of this section, VGs, unlike simple behavioral interventions, allow researchers to investigate real-life skill acquisition processes, and generalize more readily (Boot, 2015;Boot et al, 2017).…”

The Effect of Cognitive Training with Neurofeedback on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Previous studies using neuroimaging have reported that brain activities during CT or cognitive tests have an important role in cognitive improvements [ 17 , 18 , 19 ]. For example, people who showed higher brain activities at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during CT at the baseline received more benefit in processing speed and working memory from CT compared with those with lower brain activities [ 18 ].…”