School of Psychology & Centre for Brain Research, University of Auckland.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2021 Jan;16(1):148-160. doi: 10.1177/1745691620950696. Epub 2020 Oct 6.
Recent popular areas of research in psychology suggest that behavioral interventions can have profound effects on our cognitive abilities. In particular, the study of brain training, video gaming, mindset, and stereotype threat all include claims that low-cost, noninvasive manipulations of the environment can greatly affect individual performance. Here, I provide a quantitative reappraisal of this literature, focusing on recent meta-analytic findings. Specifically, I show that effect-size distributions in the four aforementioned areas are best modeled by multiple rather than single latent distributions, suggesting important discrepancies in the effect sizes reported. I further demonstrate that these multimodal characteristics are not typical within the broader field of psychology, using 107 meta-analyses published in three top-tier journals as a comparison. The effect-size distributions observed in cognitive-intervention research therefore appear to be uncommon, and their characteristics are largely unexplained by current theoretical frameworks of cognitive improvement. Before the source of these discrepancies is better understood, the current study calls for constructive skepticism in evaluating claims of cognitive improvement after behavioral interventions and for caution when this line of research influences large-scale policies.
心理学领域的研究热点表明，行为干预可以对我们的认知能力产生深远的影响。特别是大脑训练、视频游戏、思维模式和刻板印象威胁等研究领域都声称，低成本、非侵入性的环境干预可以极大地影响个体的表现。在这里，我对这一文献进行了定量评估，重点关注最近的元分析发现。具体来说，我表明，上述四个领域的效应大小分布最好通过多个而不是单个潜在分布来建模，这表明报告的效应大小存在重要差异。我进一步证明，这些多模态特征在心理学更广泛的领域中并不常见，我使用三个顶级期刊发表的 107 项荟萃分析作为比较。因此，认知干预研究中观察到的效应大小分布似乎并不常见，而且目前关于认知提升的理论框架还无法很好地解释这些分布的特征。在更好地理解这些差异的来源之前，本研究呼吁在评估行为干预后认知提升的主张时保持建设性的怀疑态度，并在该研究领域影响大规模政策时保持谨慎。
