FLICKR, J E THERIOTCompanies hawking brain-training games have enjoyed massive success in recent years. Joe Hardy, the vice president of research and development at Lumosity—one of the most well-known of these companies—told The Scientist in an e-mail that his firm has more than 50 million users. These ventures bank on consumers’ expectations of cognitive benefits from brain training, but the scientific evidence to date suggests that the games do little beyond make people better at the specific tasks involved in game-play.
“Psychologists have been trying to come up with ways to increase intelligence for a very long time,” said D. Zachary Hambrick, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “We’ve been interested in increasing intelligence for almost as long as we’ve studied intelligence, which is over a century.”
Psychologist Randall Engle’s group at Georgia Tech has previously shown that working memory capacity is highly correlated with complex learning, problem solving, and general attention control. But he pointed out that this correlation does not mean that by increasing working memory capacity, fluid intelligence can be increased. “This idea that intelligence can be trained would be a great thing if it were true,” Engle said.
In 2008, scientists at the University of Michigan and the University of ...
