Posts tagged lumosity
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Online games offer trove of brain data
Study of 35 million users of brain-training software finds alcohol and sleep linked to cognitive performance.
By trawling through data from 35 million users of online ‘brain-training’ tools, researchers have conducted a survey of what they say is the world’s largest data set of human cognitive performance. Their preliminary results show that drinking moderately correlates with better cognitive performance and that sleeping too little or too much has a negative association.
The study, published this week in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, analysed user data from Lumosity, a collection of web-based games made by Lumos Labs, based in San Francisco, California. Researchers at Lumos conducted the study in collaboration with scientists at two US universities as part of the Human Cognition Project, which the authors describe as “a collaborative research effort to describe the human mind”.
The authors examined results from more than 600 million completed tasks — which measured players’ speed, memory capacity and cognitive flexibility — to get a snapshot of how lifestyle factors can affect cognition and how learning ability changes with age.
Users who enjoyed one or two alcoholic drinks a day tended to perform better on cognitive tasks than teetotallers and heavier drinkers, whose scores dropped as the number of daily drinks increased. The optimal sleep time was seven hours, with performance worsening for every hour of sleep lost or added.
The study authors also looked at performance over time for users who returned to the same brain-training tasks at least 25 times. Performance decreased with age, but the ability to learn new tasks that relied on ‘crystallized knowledge’ (such as vocabulary) did not decline as quickly as it did for those that measured ‘fluid intelligence’ (such as the ability to memorize new sets of information).
Daniel Sternberg, a data scientist at Lumos who led the study, and his colleagues say that their study sample is much broader than those of most psychological studies, which tend to draw from pools of university students.
Buzzwords and biased samples?
But Frederick Unverzagt, neuropsychologist at Indiana University in Indianapolis, who has studied other cognitive-training tools such as training courses in verbal reasoning or speed processing in patients with dementia, says that the sample in this study is also biased: the users of brain-training tools are younger (compared to the typical dementia patients), most of them live in the United States or Europe and, most importantly, they are likely to already be interested in cognitive-training tasks. Although Lumosity has a pool of 35 million users, when the researchers looked at changes in performance over time, they focused on groups of about 22,000 people.
“From a trials perspective, this is very selective,” says Fred Wolinsky, a public-health researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who has also studied the efficacy of brain-training techniques. “The lower performance scores they saw in older individuals,” he says, “could be attributable to the fact that the older adults were the ones who stuck with it for a long time because they were the ones who needed the training the most.”
And the findings are not controversial or particularly surprising. “But what is interesting and important is this idea that we can have a new paradigm for doing this kind of research: looking at large data sets in order to look at many different kinds of people, to tease out the demographic and lifestyle factors that influence cognition,” says Sternberg. “There are many other interesting questions that other researchers could answer by using this data set — this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Brain Training May Help Clear Cognitive Fog Caused by Chemotherapy
The mental fuzziness induced by cancer treatment could be eased by cognitive exercises performed online, say researchers.
Cancer survivors sometimes suffer from a condition known as “chemo fog”—a cognitive impairment caused by repeated chemotherapy. A study hints at a controversial idea: that brain-training software might help lift this cognitive cloud.
Various studies have concluded that cognitive training can improve brain function in both healthy people and those with medical conditions, but the broader applicability of these results remains controversial in the field.
In a study published in the journal Clinical Breast Cancer, investigators report that those who used a brain-training program for 12 weeks were more cognitively flexible, more verbally fluent, and faster-thinking than survivors who did not train.
Patients treated with chemotherapy show changes in brain structure and function in line with diffuse brain injury, and they often report long-term cognitive effects, says Shelli Kesler, a Stanford University clinical neuropsychologist who led the research. The new study “suggests that cognitive training could be one possible avenue for helping to improve cognitive function in breast cancer survivors treated with chemotherapy,” she says.
The results may not convince everyone. “One of the biggest challenges in the cognitive training world is to show an effect that generalizes to real-world functioning,” says Susan Landau, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Several companies offer commercial cognitive training programs that promise improvements in memory, attention, mental agility, and problem-solving skills. The appeal is clear, says Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, but whether they have lasting general effects is not.
The fact that companies are marketing these training programs to customers before their value has been rigorously proved has caused some skepticism in the field, say experts. “The field is still growing,” says Suzanne Jaeggi, a neuropsychologist at the University of Maryland. While studies have shown that there are cognitive benefits to the training, it’s very hard to detect an impact on daily life, she says. However, some work, including research by her own group, has shown that working memory exercises can improve reading abilities in schoolchildren.
In the study conducted by Kesler and colleagues, the participants trained at home on Lumosity, a collection of gamelike cognitive exercises developed by Lumos Labs in San Francisco. (Lumos Labs did not fund the study.)
Kesler’s project is one of around two dozen efforts using Lumosity software to study human cognition. With 35 million customers worldwide, Lumosity is collecting what it says is the world’s largest database of human cognition, which could be queried for connections between lifestyle and cognitive ability. “Our technology collects a lot of data and makes it easy to run experiments to learn more generally about human cognitive performance,” says Mike Scanlon, cofounder of Lumos Labs. “We track all of the results from the cognitive testing and training, and we can combine that with demographic information to learn about how people’s cognitive performance changes and develops over the years.”
One such finding, he says, is a correlation between outside weather temperature and cognitive performance: “It turned out that the colder it is, the higher people’s performance is, even though generally they are inside doing this on a computer.”
Most of the scientific projects involving Lumosity’s software are exploring the effectiveness of brain training in different populations, from schoolchildren to stroke patients. For the study on breast cancer survivors, 41 women aged 40 and older, who were at least a year and half past their last chemotherapy treatment, were tested on several cognitive tasks at the beginning of the study. Then half the women used Lumosity training modules for 20 to 30 minutes four times a week for 12 weeks, and all were tested again.
When the investigators tested the participants in verbal memory, processing speed, and cognitive function, they found that the women who had used the brain training program improved in three of five objective measures.
“This is a well-done study—they had not just one transfer test but several,” says Hambrick, who notes that many studies of cognitive training depend on a single test to measure results. “But an issue is the lack of activity within the control group.” Better would be to have the control group do another demanding cognitive task in lieu of Lumosity training—something analogous to a placebo, he says: “The issue is that maybe the improvement in the group that did the cognitive training doesn’t reflect enhancement of basic cognitive processes per se, but could be a motivational phenomenon.”
Even if the effects are due to motivation or some other benefit not related to mental agility, that’s still useful, says Landau. “If [cognitive training] is something that makes people feel good and improves their confidence in their own skills, that’s not trivial at all,” she says. “That could be a big part of the effect that’s observed.”
(Source: technologyreview.com)