No Effect of Commercial Cognitive Training on Brain Activity, Choice Behavior, or Cognitive Performance

Abstract

Increased preference for immediate over delayed rewards and for risky over certain rewards has been associated with unhealthy behavioral choices. Motivated by evidence that enhanced cognitive control can shift choice behavior away from immediate and risky rewards, we tested whether training executive cognitive function could influence choice behavior and brain responses. In this randomized controlled trial, 128 young adults (71 male, 57 female) participated in 10 weeks of training with either a commercial web-based cognitive training program or web-based video games that do not specifically target executive function or adapt the level of difficulty throughout training. Pretraining and post-training, participants completed cognitive assessments and functional magnetic resonance imaging during performance of the following validated decision-making tasks: delay discounting (choices between smaller rewards now vs larger rewards in the future) and risk sensitivity (choices between larger riskier rewards vs smaller certain rewards). Contrary to our hypothesis, we found no evidence that cognitive training influences neural activity during decision-making; nor did we find effects of cognitive training on measures of delay discounting or risk sensitivity. Participants in the commercial training condition improved with practice on the specific tasks they performed during training, but participants in both conditions showed similar improvement on standardized cognitive measures over time. Moreover, the degree of improvement was comparable to that observed in individuals who were reassessed without any training whatsoever. Commercial adaptive cognitive training appears to have no benefits in healthy young adults above those of standard video games for measures of brain activity, choice behavior, or cognitive performance.

Neural and behavioral correlates of episodic memory are associated with temporal discounting in older adults

“…Thus, our findings provide key evidence that declarative memory processes are a more important contributor to future-directed decision-making than executive function. Although there is a well-documented association between temporal discounting and fluid intelligence (Shamosh et al, 2008;Burks et al, 2009;Kable et al, 2017), in principle, it could be that declarative memory processes underpin this association. Recent research has shown that the strong correlation between working memory and general intelligence (Ackerman et al, 2005) may be driven by individual differences in declarative memory processes, such as search and retrieval (Mogle et al, 2008;Unsworth et al, 2009;Healey et al, 2014).…”

Simulating future rewards: exploring the impacts of implicit context association and arithmetic booster in delay discounting

“…Addressing this, various cognitive training platforms (e.g., Lumosity 43 ) and potential intervention frameworks 34,35 were introduced to target multiple cognitive domains, including working memory, problem solving, and fluid reasoning. However, mixed results were reported whether or not the training effects are transferrable to other cognitive functions [44][45][46][47] . Our results highlight that there may be different training effects for each specific type of cognitive function.…”

An old task in new clothes: A preregistered direct replication attempt of enclothed cognition effects on Stroop performance

“…In their discussion of experiments 2 and 3, the authors assert that these improvements in performance appear not to be caused by greater effort, but rather by an increase in the mental abilities themselves. This relatively easy improvement would appear to contrast sharply with the general failure of brain training games to produce performance gains on cognitive tasks relative to control conditions (Kable et al, 2017).…”