Hampshire Adam, Sandrone Stefano, Hellyer Peter John
The Computational, Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory, Division of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2019 Jul 9;13:221. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00221. eCollection 2019.
Brain training is a large and expanding industry, and yet there is a recurrent and ongoing debate concerning its scientific basis or evidence for efficacy. Much of evidence for the efficacy of brain training within this debate is from small-scale studies that do not assess the type of "brain training," the specificity of transfer effects, or the length of training required to achieve a generalized effect. To explore these factors, we analyze cross-sectional data from two large Internet-cohort studies (total = 60,222) to determine whether cognition differs at the population level for individuals who report that they brain train on different devices, and across different timeframes, with programs in common use circa 2010-2013. Examining scores for an assessment of working-memory, reasoning and verbal abilities shows no cognitive advantages for individuals who brain train. This contrasts unfavorably with significant advantages for individuals who regularly undertake other cognitive pursuits such as computer, board and card games. However, finer grained analyses reveal a more complex relationship between brain training and cognitive performance. Specifically, individuals who have just begun to brain train start from a low cognitive baseline compared to individuals who have never engaged in brain training, whereas those who have trained for a year or more have higher working-memory and verbal scores compared to those who have just started, thus suggesting an efficacy for brain training over an period of time. The advantages in global function, working memory, and verbal memory after several months of training are plausible and of clinically relevant scale. However, this relationship is not evident for reasoning performance or self-report measures of everyday function (e.g., employment status and problems with attention). These results accord with the view that although brain training programs can produce benefits, these might extend to tasks that are operationally similar to the training regime. Furthermore, the duration of training regime required for effective enhancement of cognitive performance is longer than that applied in most previous studies.
大脑训练是一个规模庞大且不断发展的行业，然而，关于其科学依据或功效证据的争论一直反复不断。在这场争论中，大脑训练功效的许多证据都来自小规模研究，这些研究并未评估“大脑训练”的类型、迁移效应的特异性，或实现普遍效果所需的训练时长。为了探究这些因素，我们分析了两项大型互联网队列研究（总计60222人）的横断面数据，以确定在2010 - 2013年左右常用的项目中，报告在不同设备上进行大脑训练的个体，以及在不同时间范围内，在总体人群层面上认知是否存在差异。对工作记忆、推理和语言能力评估分数的检查表明，进行大脑训练的个体没有认知优势。这与经常进行其他认知活动（如电脑游戏、棋类游戏和纸牌游戏）的个体具有显著优势形成了不利对比。然而，更细致的分析揭示了大脑训练与认知表现之间更为复杂的关系。具体而言，与从未进行过大脑训练的个体相比，刚开始进行大脑训练的个体认知基线较低，而与刚开始训练的个体相比，训练一年或更长时间的个体具有更高的工作记忆和语言分数，这表明大脑训练在一段时间后具有功效。经过几个月训练后，在整体功能、工作记忆和语言记忆方面的优势是合理的，且具有临床相关规模。然而，这种关系在推理表现或日常功能的自我报告测量（如就业状况和注意力问题）中并不明显。这些结果与以下观点一致，即尽管大脑训练项目可以产生益处，但这些益处可能仅限于与训练方式在操作上相似程度的任务。此外，有效提高认知表现所需的训练时长比大多数先前研究中应用的时长更长。
