An Effective Brain Training
by The exercises implementing short-term memory of a child’s foster thinking skills … if the child is motivated. The famous game of Dr. Kawashima Brain Training on a handheld console is it effective? If so, what audience he intended? Commercial offers brain training, cognitive or rather, continue to multiply, without really knowing if they improve thinking skills. Susanne Jaeggi and colleagues, Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, United States, show that cognitive training of memory called working to improve reasoning skills of children. But all children do not draw the same benefits …
The ability to reason and solve new tasks, called fluid intelligence, is a factor of general intelligence targeted cognitive exercises. The other form of intelligence, known as crystallized, is the ability to apply knowledge and skills. Some cognitive training can improve fluid intelligence, including those implementing the working memory (or short term), that is to say, the cognitive system that can store and manipulate data temporarily limited. Working memory is involved especially in complex cognitive tasks such as reading, reasoning and solving problems. It is taking place gradually in childhood.
To show that cognitive training involving working memory improves fluid intelligence, American psychologists were trained for one month approximately 62 children aged 9 years, with five sessions of 15 minutes per week. The first group of children carried out an exercise implementing working memory: they viewing sequences of video games in which a target appeared in different parts of the screen. When the stimulus reappeared in a place where it was already past, children had to press a button. The second group of children rather realized exercises of vocabulary and general knowledge, to stimulate their crystallized intelligence. To motivate children, all practices were using pictures and attractive graphics similar to video games. Before, immediately after and three months after the training sessions, the researchers measured the performance of children with two classic tests of reasoning in cognitive psychology.
Result, children who worked their working memory had greater ability to reason right after training, but after three months, compared with children who have boosted their general knowledge. Evidence that cognitive training would affect the long term.
However, the benefit was small (about 20 per cent) and some children had not improved. Why? Children less motivated and less enthusiastic in cognitive training and those who found the training too complicated, had the worst results. This suggests that training of working memory is only effective if adapted to the abilities of participants – there should be neither too simple nor too complex – and if done in a playful way. Thus, games of so-called doctors on your handheld or will they grow they will improve educational outcomes for your children? Nothing is less certain.
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