Digital “brain-training” games promising to improve users’ memory, focus or attention and stave off mental decline simply don’t have enough solid evidence to make their ambitious claims, a wide-ranging review of scientific literature alleges.
The new findings challenge a multi-billion dollar industry that only promises to grow as Baby Boomers age.
The review, published Monday in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, finds “extensive evidence” that brain-training interventions improve performance on the tasks that users directly train for — remembering a string of numbers or letters, for instance — but less evidence that mastering these tasks can improve performance on related ones, such as remembering your grandchildren’s mobile phone numbers or their birthdays.
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