Au Jacky, Gibson Benjamin C, Bunarjo Kimberly, Buschkuehl Martin, Jaeggi Susanne M
Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92617.
Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131.
J Cogn Enhanc. 2020 Jun;4(2):192-210. doi: 10.1007/s41465-020-00164-6. Epub 2020 Jan 29.
Despite promising reports of broad cognitive benefit in studies of cognitive training, it has been argued that the reliance of many studies on no-intervention control groups (passive controls) make these reports difficult to interpret because placebo effects cannot be ruled out. Although researchers have recently been trying to incorporate more active controls, in which participants engage in an alternate intervention, previous work has been contentious as to whether this actually yields meaningfully different results. To better understand the influence of passive and active control groups on cognitive interventions, we conducted two meta-analyses to estimate their relative effect sizes. While the first one broadly surveyed the literature by compiling data from 34 meta-analyses, the second one synthesized data from 42 empirical studies that simultaneously employed both types of controls. Both analyses showed no meaningful performance difference between passive and active controls, suggesting that current active control placebo paradigms might not be appropriately designed to reliably capture these non-specific effects or that these effects are minimal in this literature.
尽管认知训练研究中有关于广泛认知益处的前景乐观的报告，但有人认为，许多研究对无干预对照组（被动对照组）的依赖使得这些报告难以解释，因为无法排除安慰剂效应。尽管研究人员最近一直在尝试纳入更多的主动对照组，即参与者参与另一种干预，但之前的研究对于这是否真的能产生有意义的不同结果一直存在争议。为了更好地理解被动和主动对照组对认知干预的影响，我们进行了两项荟萃分析来估计它们的相对效应大小。第一项通过汇总34项荟萃分析的数据对文献进行了广泛的调查，第二项则综合了42项同时采用两种类型对照组的实证研究的数据。两项分析均表明，被动和主动对照组之间在表现上没有有意义的差异，这表明当前的主动对照安慰剂范式可能设计得不够恰当，无法可靠地捕捉这些非特异性效应，或者在该文献中这些效应很小。
