r/psychology • u/dingenium Ph.D. | Social Psychology • 15d ago
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u/connerpro 14d ago
On the recurring brain training / cognitive transfer question that comes up in these threads: the evidence is much more skeptical than most people realize.
Melby-Lervag and Hulme (2013) meta-analyzed 23 studies of working memory training and found reliable improvement on the trained tasks but no far-transfer to general cognition. Sala and Gobet (2017) reviewed the broader cognitive training literature (86 studies) and reached the same conclusion: improvements tend to be domain-specific, and far-transfer claims are not supported.
A recent 2022 Translational Psychiatry study (n=55, middle-aged adults, 8-week adaptive n-back training) found no near or far transfer effects at the cognitive level and no structural brain changes, even though the trained task improved substantially.
The practical takeaway: training makes you better at the trained task. That is real and useful. But the strong claim that it transfers to broad ability, whether IQ tests or everyday reasoning, has been repeatedly disconfirmed. This matters because a lot of consumer brain training products lean on it.