Your health: Brain games don't improve everyday cognition, researchers say

Do brain games help with cognition?

Spend enough time playing "brain-training" games, and you'll get pretty good at games. But you won't necessarily get better at anything else, The Washington Post reports.

That's the conclusion of an extensive review published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest this month. A team of psychologists scoured the scientific literature for studies held up by brain-training proponents as evidence that the technique works - and found the research wanting.

Training tools enhanced performance on the tasks that they tested, which makes sense: Spend enough time matching colored cards or memorizing strings of letters, and you'll start to get really good at matching colors and memorizing letters.

But there is "little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance," the authors write.

They also argue that the studies used to promote brain-training tools had major problems with their design or analysis that make it impossible to draw any general conclusions from them.

"It's disappointing that the evidence isn't stronger," Daniel Simons, an author of the article and a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told NPR. "It would be really nice if you could play some games and have it radically change your cognitive abilities. But the studies don't show that on objectively measured real-world outcomes."

Brain-training programs have been controversial for years. Starting in the mid-2000s, a number of experiments suggested that astonishing cognitive improvements could be induced by simple training-game interventions.

One of the most high-profile studies, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, found that about four weeks of brain training dramatically improved young adults' ability to solve problems they had never encountered before.

The big claim was that the technique could produce "vertical transfer" of cognitive skills - in other words, playing games would boost the brain's ability to do more sophisticated tasks.

But other researchers have had trouble reproducing this work. In 2014, a coalition of 70 scientists published an open letter on the website of the Stanford Center on Longevity questioning whether there was any scientific evidence that training games actually improve general cognitive function.

More than 100 brain-training proponents responded with an open letter of their own on the website Cognitive Training Data. They argued that, though more research is needed, there is evidence that cognitive-training regimens work, and they listed 132 studies to back up their claims. Some of those studies were the same ones that skeptics of brain training cited to cast doubt on the technique.

"How could two teams of scientists examine the same literature and come to conflicting 'consensus' views about the effectiveness of brain training?" Simons and his colleagues write. Hoping to bring some clarity to the debate, they analyzed all 132 studies and tried to apply some objective standards.

To definitively prove that brain-training results in vertical transfer, studies should have a good control group, one that was assigned a comparable task to brain training to prove that it is really the specific technique that led to the improvements. They should test a large number of participants to weed out the possibility of results that are a statistical fluke. And they should account for expectations and biases - people who play training games are likely to expect to become smarter, much as people who take a placebo pill expect to feel better.

According to Simons and his colleagues, nearly every one of the brain-training studies they looked at failed to meet these standards.

The studies that subscribed to psychology's best practices suggested that brain training made participants better at the specific task being tested, but did not lead to any generalized improvements.

The review was lauded by several of the 70 scientists who cosigned the 2014 letter casting doubt on brain training and was, perhaps predictably, criticized by advocates of the technique.

Speaking to the Atlantic, Henry Mahncke, a neuroscientist and chief executive of the training company Posit Science, accused Simons's team of bias: "They twisted every one of those studies to fit their theories that cognitive training can't work," he said.

But brain-training programs have already suffered a financial blow. In January, the Federal Trade Commission announced that the creators of the brain-training game Lumosity would pay $2 million to settle charges of deceptive advertising. The company has since scaled back its claims - instead of promoting the game as a way to get smarter, Lumosity's website describes it simply as "designed by scientists to challenge core cognitive abilities."

Training games may someday prove to boost the brain, Simons and his colleagues write.

But they haven't yet.

Don't expect Fitbits to improve health

Wearing a fitness tracker may help you keep tabs on how many steps you take, but the devices themselves - even with the lure of a cash reward - probably won't improve your health, according to the biggest study yet done on the trendy technology, The Associated Press reports.

Scientists say that although the activity trackers may boost the number of steps people take, it probably isn't enough to help them drop pounds or improve overall health.

"These are basically measuring devices," said Eric Finkelstein, a professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who led the research. "Knowing how active you are doesn't translate into getting people to do more and the novelty of having that information wears off pretty quickly."

Finkelstein and colleagues tested the Fitbit Zip tracker in a group of 800 adults in Singapore, by dividing them into four groups. Of those people, more than half were overweight and obese and about one-third were active.

A control group got information about exercise but no tracker, and a second group got the Fitbit Zip; everyone in those groups also got about $2.92 a week. Participants in the last two groups got the tracker and about $11 for every week they logged between 50,000 and 70,000 steps. One of the groups had the money donated to charity while the other kept the cash.

After six months, people with the Fitbit and who got the cash payment showed the biggest boost in physical activity. But after a year, 90 percent of participants had abandoned the device. The physical activity of the Fitbit wearers did not decline over the year as much as it did for those who were not given a tracker, but the higher activity level wasn't enough to produce any improvements in weight, oxygen capacity, or blood pressure.

"These trackers can encourage people to take more steps, but it still seems like these random extra steps aren't enough to really improve your health," Finkelstein said. He said what's needed is more "active steps," or what would amount to brisk walking or more rigorous exercise.

The study was paid for by Singapore's ministry of health and published online recently in the journal Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.

The results seem to reinforce those of another study, published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In that study, conducted over two years, researchers found that adding wearable activity tracking devices to a diet and fitness program didn't result in more weight loss. Those who didn't wear devices lost about five pounds more than those who wore them, but both groups slimmed down and improved their eating habits, fitness and activity levels.

Fitbit, in a statement responding to the most recent study, said: "We are confident in the positive results our millions of users have seen from using Fitbit products." The statement went on to say that it was in the process of improving its trackers.

Finkelstein said some of the newer fitness trackers have more advanced features, like prompts to exercise and ways to link to social media, but he still thinks it is unlikely people will radically change their exercise regimes without a more comprehensive approach.

Some experts said the results were disappointing but not surprising.

"We should not be so naive to believe that simply by giving a sleek-looking gadget to someone, they will change deeply-rooted lifestyle habits," said Emmanuel Stamatakis, a physical activity expert at the University of Sydney who was not part of the research.

Others said the trackers might be more useful if they were aimed specifically at unhealthy people.

"People who are active are already motivated so they don't need these devices," said Lars Bo Andersen of Norway's Sogn and Fjordane University College.

Fitbit shares have fallen by half since the beginning of the year, to just under $15 a share.