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Are brain-training games any better at improving your ability to think, remember and focus than regular computer games? Possibly not, if the latest study is anything to go by.

Joseph Kable at the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues have tested the popular Luminosity brain-training program from Lumos Labs in San Francisco, California, against other computer games and found no evidence that it is any better at improving your thinking skills.

Brain-training is a booming market. It’s based on the premise that our brains change in response to learning challenges. Unlike computer games designed purely for entertainment, brain-training games are meant to be adaptive, adjusting challenge levels in response to a player’s changing performance. The thinking is that this should improve a player’s memory, attention, focus and multitasking skills.

But there are questions over whether brain-training platforms can enhance cognitive function in a way that is meaningful for wider life. Last year, Lumos Labs paid $2 million to settle a charge from the US Federal Trade Commission for false advertising. Advertising campaigns had claimed that the company’s memory and attention games could reduce the effects of age-related dementia, and stave off Alzheimer’s disease.

Practice makes perfect

Most studies on the effects of brain-training games have been small and had mixed results. For this study, Kable and his colleagues recruited 128 young healthy adults for a randomised controlled trial.

For 10 weeks, some of the volunteers used Lumosity, while others spent the same amount of time playing typical online video games, such as Love Letter and Elastico. A third group played no games at all.

All the volunteers were assessed using a standard battery of cognitive tests, plus brain imaging scans, before and after the 10-week period.

Those who played Lumosity did show improvements in some cognitive skills, such as attention and focus, but so did those who played the other computer games, and the people who played no games at all. This suggests they all performed better on the second batch of tests simply because they’d already done them once.

Worth the money?

“It would be hard on the basis of this study to make grand claims about how Lumosity doesn’t work under any conditions, for anyone, ever,” says Kable. “But I think we’re pretty confident in the null finding in this case, when you’re dealing with healthy young adults.”

The team’s results are consistent with the conclusions of that reviewed evidence so far on brain-training games. “With practice, you can improve performance on these games, and on tasks very similar to these games, but there is very little convincing evidence that benefits generalise beyond that,” says Walter Boot of Florida State University, who was part of the team that conducted the review.

However, Lumosity says on its website that it has done a .

The number of people involved in Kable’s study was too small to detect any tiny improvements in performance, so it’s possible a small effect was missed.

“But this raises the question of whether a brain-training program that only has a small effect on cognition is worth the time and money,” says Boot.

Journal reference: Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: