Strong Roger W, Alvarez George A
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA,
J Vis. 2017 Apr 1;17(4):4. doi: 10.1167/17.4.4.
Cognitive training has become a billion-dollar industry with the promise that exercising a cognitive faculty (e.g., attention) on simple "brain games" will lead to improvements on any task relying on the same faculty. Although this logic seems sound, it assumes performance improves on training tasks because attention's capacity has been enhanced. Alternatively, training may result in attentional expertise-an enhancement of the ability to deploy attention to particular content-such that improvement on training tasks is specific to the features of the training context. The present study supported this attentional expertise hypothesis, showing that training benefits did not generalize fully from a trained attentional tracking task to untrained tracking tasks requiring a common attentional capacity, but differing in seemingly superficial features (i.e., retinotopic location and or motion type). This specificity suggests that attentional training benefits are linked to enhanced coordination between attentional processes and content-specific perceptual representations. Thus, these results indicate that shared attentional capacity between tasks is insufficient for producing generalized training benefits, and predict that generalization requires attentional expertise for content present in both training and outcome tasks.
认知训练已成为一个价值数十亿美元的产业，其宣称在简单的“脑力游戏”中锻炼一种认知能力（如注意力）将能提升依赖于同一能力的任何任务的表现。尽管这种逻辑看似合理，但它假定训练任务的表现提升是因为注意力的能力得到了增强。或者，训练可能会带来注意力专长——一种将注意力部署到特定内容上的能力增强——使得训练任务的提升特定于训练情境的特征。本研究支持了这种注意力专长假说，表明训练益处并未从经过训练的注意力跟踪任务完全推广到需要共同注意力能力但在看似表面特征（即视网膜定位和/或运动类型）上有所不同的未训练跟踪任务。这种特异性表明注意力训练益处与注意力过程和特定内容感知表征之间增强的协调相关联。因此，这些结果表明任务之间共享的注意力能力不足以产生普遍的训练益处，并预测推广需要在训练任务和结果任务中都存在针对内容的注意力专长。
