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Brain training programs make sweeping promises don't they? Is it worth it to invest time and money into often tedious activities? Psychological science tells us that it's probably not worth it. If you want to get better at super-specific hand-eye coordination, then go ahead and sign up for the on-line program, but don't expect sweeping changes. When you do a brain training program you may indeed get better at that program, but there is no evidence that such improvements transfer to different, school related performance.
Exhibit A
Exhibit A
87.8% of people surveyed believed the myth that brain training programs will help people become better students.
Brain training is based on the idea that practicing certain cognitive abilities (executive function, working memory, etc.) on a narrow scale in a specific context will overall improve these skills in day-to-day life (Boot et al. 2016).
The myth is believable because original studies found slight improvements in students’ abilities to memorize tasks given training programs (Katz et al. 2018).
Brain training programs tend to only facilitate bottom-up processing and only incorporates sensory stimuli.
In order to successfully increase cognitive control, one would have to use the schema level of attention training, which incorporates prior knowledge, visual stimuli, auditory stimuli, and behavior. This allows for more information to be integrated into the brain’s flow patterns, thus creating more connections in the brain (Kleinknecht, E. 2021).
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