Ready to level up your performance? Here are nine examples of cognitive skills to work on to strengthen your professional development:. The ability to draw specific conclusions based on varied facts or data is your deductive reasoning.

Even mundane tasks, like organizing your calendar, require strong logic and problem-solving skills. Deductive reasoning also helps you gauge importance, estimate work times, and set realistic goals. Without these logical thinking skills, you would struggle to work productively. Language is divided into four skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Every person is different — you may be an excellent writer but struggle with verbally expressing your ideas. However, clearly communicating your ideas is valuable in just about any role. Strong language skills can help you overcome miscommunications, resolve conflict, and encourage teamwork.

Critical thinking is a union of several soft skills , including attention to detail, intellectual curiosity , and open-mindedness. These traits are integral to problem-solving because they help you work through biases and arrive at independent, out-of-the-box solutions.

Your day-to-day is full of short-term tasks and long-term objectives. Without proper planning, you could become disorganized or miss important deadlines. Planning requires logic and memory recall — these skills allow you to estimate a task's relevance and how long it should take to complete.

Learning to organize and prioritize your tasks empowers you to be efficient, responsible, and proactive. An understanding of statistics and math helps you turn ideas into data and eliminate emotional biases from important decisions. Data analysis is an increasingly important hard skill to have on your resume.

And as artificial intelligence and big data can contribute to businesses project growth and calculate risk, learning quantitative tools might help you stay competitive in the job market.

Making the right first impression is a science. Practicing active listening trains your brain to sustain its focus and pick up on information that will lead to positive and productive professional interactions. In the digital age, we work with more emails, project management tools, and messenger apps than ever before.

And when someone understands a message immediately, it saves you and your colleagues time that you can dedicate to more important tasks. Reading requires you to connect ideas, sustain your focus, and recall past experiences or know-how to de-code information. Similar to writing, analyzing and contextualizing information can help you avoid misunderstandings and improve your productivity.

Reading comprehension is important in any job, particularly remote jobs that depend heavily on written communication. While collaboration may sound more like a social skill than a cognitive function, efficient teamwork requires abstract thinking. Inspired to level up your cognitive capacities? Here are four ways to take care of your brain:.

Your physical and mental health are intimately connected to one another. Besides working up a sweat, physical exercise builds new neurons and stimulates memory by increasing blood flow to the brain.

Consider developing a routine to get your minutes of recommended weekly exercise , like an after work swim, joining a jogging club, or hiring a personal trainer. Similarly, a firm sleep schedule , staying hydrated , and good nutrition are complimentary habits that contribute to better brain health.

Repetition leads to success, which also applies to strengthening your focus. Methods like the Pomodoro Technique and concentration-based apps are great ways to build self-awareness and discover how you can stay on track.

Learning task management methods like the Eisenhower Matrix , adopting work productivity tools, or occasional digital detoxes are more ways to prioritize your focus.

Find what works for you and practice until it becomes a habit. This prolonged ability to concentrate will strengthen your overall cognitive abilities.

Worry activates your fight or flight response , which can cause mental fatigue and poor sleep. Acute stress or anxiety can often be improved by developing regular self-care practices, such as meditation , yoga, and deep breathing.

Chronic stress is a more serious mental health risk with serious implications on your short term wellness and long-term cognitive health. Mental health professionals can help you identify the root cause of your stress and provide you with the tools and resources to ease your mind.

Your brain is like any other muscle in your body — to keep it in peak condition, you need to work it out. Chores can boost hand-eye coordination and help your child develop problem-solving skills.

Art projects can help boost kids' imagination and ability to come up with images and ideas. In addition, art projects can also help children simultaneously develop their fine motor skills. Looking in the mirror can be a great exercise for little ones who are developing cognitive skills.

When your child looks in the mirror, have them make faces associated with different emotions. Playing with mirrors can help children develop their own self-image. This will also help a child identify and express emotions appropriately. Playing pretend is a great way to encourage cognitive development in kids.

Not only does playing pretend encourage the use of imagination, it can also be a powerful tool for developing social skills in kids. Sports aren't just for developing strong bodies. Recent research shows that sports help develop strong minds in kids, too. Sports, especially extracurricular team sports, help kids develop important skills like concentration, cooperation, and more.

Focusing on cognitive development in kids in the home is a good way to promote cognitive skill improvement as family. For extra help, get in touch with Brain Balance Achievement Centers. Because of these stronger connections, the load of the task is sort of distributed.

While this research does have the potential to help individuals, Anderson has his sights set on wider societal and policy changes. Health and Wellness Social Innovation Sustainability Technology for Good The New Economy.

Health and Wellness. Search here Improving Cognitive Abilities in Older Adults. By Dan Rubinstein. The human brain is the most complex organ in the body and the most powerful computer in the universe.

It controls everything from thought, emotion and memory to breathing and motor skills—the full spectrum of psychological and physical activities that allow us to engage with and make sense of the world. But what happens when it ages?

One theory that helps them understand this is cognitive learning theory. Cognitive learning theory uses metacognition, or the idea that individuals think about their own thinking, to explain how people learn throughout their lifetimes. Fundamentally, cognitive learning theory can be used to help people enhance their memory retention and their overall productivity by understanding their thought processes while they learn, meaning that their learning can be guided more effectively.

According to the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, children move through four stages of cognitive development as they become adults.

Understanding these stages is important in understanding what individuals are capable of learning and understanding at any point in their lives. In the sensorimotor stage, infants and toddlers acquire knowledge through their senses and by handling objects. Their development mostly takes place through basic reflexes and motor responses, including sucking, grasping, looking and listening.

In the preoperational stage, language begins to develop. Children in this stage start to use words and pictures and understand the relationship between language and objects in their everyday lives. They do, however, struggle to see things from the perspective of others and think in very concrete terms.

In the concrete operational stage, children become better at using logic and at understanding the perspective of others. They begin to understand how to have more complex conversations and can use inductive logic reasoning from specific information.

In the formal operational stage, the final stage of cognitive development, children and young adults increase their use of logic and can understand abstract ideas. Cognitive learning theory can also be applied in a workplace setting to help individuals excel and succeed in their careers via workplace learning.

Instructors can use different techniques to help individuals positively adjust their behaviour and learn more effectively, including the following:.

Cognitive behavioural theory seeks to explain how thoughts and feelings can influence behaviour, and how, in turn, these thoughts and feelings can affect learning. By using cognitive behavioural theory, instructors try to assist learners to have a positive mindset, so they can learn most effectively and retain information.

Instructors endeavour to motivate and incentivise students and ensure that they can focus in the classroom. The concepts of implicit and explicit learning help instructors structure their learning to maximise the amount of information learners can retain.

Implicit learning is learning that occurs without effort, whereas explicit learning does require effort. Boosting cognitive thinking can also have many other benefits, including that it:.

Here are seven tips to boost it. Research has shown that physical activity improves cognitive performance and memory , including the ability to learn, manage stress and make better decisions.

Good quality sleep, and enough of it ideally seven to nine hours each night , helps put people in a better mood and gives them the energy they need for the day. Sleep also helps sharpen the brain by flushing out toxins that build up during the day.

The cognitive skills required to interact, including using language and memory, are critical to ensuring continued brain health. One great way to improve cognitive thinking is to try new things. When trying something new, new connections are formed in the brain, which helps to keep the brain healthy and provides a new and exciting challenge for the individual.

Learning a new language can greatly assist cognitive thinking as it helps individuals understand how to communicate in a completely different way. It also gives insights into different cultures and perspectives. Contrary to popular belief, individuals can learn a new language at any time of their lives by practising and exercising patience.

Tips for learning a new language to enhance cognitive thinking:. Board games, card games and video games can all help activate higher-order cognitive skills , as they involve socialising, strategising, reasoning, solving problems and many other skills.

Your brain will become stronger and work better with enhanced use. Investing in increasing cognitive thinking is critical for better performance, at work and in life. It can help you make better decisions, be more productive, have a better social life and, importantly, prevent cognitive decline as you age.

Ultimately, understanding cognitive thinking can give you insight into how you think, and also why you think the way you do. Armed with this information, you can objectively assess and work towards your goals in life.

Want to learn more about human cognition and behaviour? Our Graduate Diploma of Psychology Bridging will give you the opportunity to learn about contemporary theories of psychology, including social and cognitive psychology.

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Enquire Now. JCU Online Blog. Data Science. Study Online. DOWNLOAD COURSE GUIDE. The role of cognitive thinking To live our best lives at any stage, optimal cognitive thinking is important, as it enables us to perform better when studying and while at work.

Practices such as these can help improve cognitive thinking: Staying active Getting enough sleep Engaging socially Practising mindfulness Trying new things Learning a new language Playing games.

What is cognitive thinking? Cognitive biases Another important research topic in the field of cognitive thinking is cognitive biases. Cognitive psychologists are interested in many different types of biases.

Anchoring bias Anchoring bias causes people to believe or get attached to the first available piece of information, and then unconsciously use it to influence their decision-making process, even when that information is incorrect.

Confirmation bias In general, people want to believe what they already believe. Negativity bias In general, people enjoy positive events but are more impacted by negative events and outcomes.

Actor-observer bias Actor-observer bias refers to how individuals see themselves in situations, as opposed to how they see others. The halo effect The halo effect is a type of bias characterised by the first impression that individuals may have of someone or something.

Cognitive processes and mental health One particularly interesting research area for cognitive psychologists is how cognitive thinking can be used to assist with mental health via cognitive behavioural therapy CBT.

Cognitive processes and skills Fundamentally, cognitive processes are what enable us to think, acquire knowledge, remember, read, pay attention and make critical decisions. Cognitive processes The six primary cognitive processes are: 1.

Thought As one of the foundational cognitive processes, thought is essential in helping individuals make decisions, solve problems and access higher-order reasoning skills that help them assess the merits of the options available to them.

Attention As the name suggests, attention is how well individuals can stay focused on the task at hand, regardless of what distractions surround them. Learning Throughout life, human beings are constantly taking in new information and learning.

Perception Perception is the cognitive process that allows individuals to take in sights, sounds, smells and information via touch and to mentally process this information and respond to it. Memory Memory is the cognitive process that relates to how well individuals recall information, both in the short term and in the long term.

Cognitive skills Cognitive skills use cognitive processes, so individuals can better acquire knowledge and make important decisions. Here are five essential cognitive skills. Critical thinking Critical thinking helps individuals evaluate information and conduct logical thought processes.

Quantitative skills Quantitative skills involve the use of mathematics and statistics to help individuals turn ideas into measurements and to use these measurements to make important decisions.

Logic and reasoning Logic and reasoning are the skills required for individuals to solve difficult problems based on the information available. Focused attention Focused attention helps individuals prioritise tasks, especially when several competing priorities exist. How the brain learns Whenever the brain is presented with new information, new connections form between neurons.

How the brain remembers Memory is the process in which the brain encodes, stores and retrieves information. Cognitive learning theory Understanding how people learn is an important research area for cognitive psychologists.

Stages of cognitive development According to the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, children move through four stages of cognitive development as they become adults. Stage 1: Sensorimotor stage birth to two years old In the sensorimotor stage, infants and toddlers acquire knowledge through their senses and by handling objects.

Stage 2: Preoperational stage two to seven years old In the preoperational stage, language begins to develop. Stage 3: Concrete operational stage seven to 11 years old In the concrete operational stage, children become better at using logic and at understanding the perspective of others.

Stage 4: Formal operational stage 12 years old and up In the formal operational stage, the final stage of cognitive development, children and young adults increase their use of logic and can understand abstract ideas.

Collaborative learning Cognitive learning theory can also be applied in a workplace setting to help individuals excel and succeed in their careers via workplace learning. Instructors in workplaces use the following cognitive learning theory concepts: Social cognitive theory Social cognitive theory explores how people adjust their behaviour over time to create goals.

Instructors can use different techniques to help individuals positively adjust their behaviour and learn more effectively, including the following: Positive and negative reinforcement Reciprocal determinism Observational learning Self-regulatory capability Emotional coping.

Cognitive behavioural theory Cognitive behavioural theory seeks to explain how thoughts and feelings can influence behaviour, and how, in turn, these thoughts and feelings can affect learning. Implicit and explicit learning The concepts of implicit and explicit learning help instructors structure their learning to maximise the amount of information learners can retain.

Boosting cognitive thinking can also have many other benefits, including that it: Helps individuals make more objective decisions.

Improves productivity at work. Enables a richer social life. Provides an enhanced ability to learn. Encourages a better memory. Delays the onset of cognitive decline. Stay active Research has shown that physical activity improves cognitive performance and memory , including the ability to learn, manage stress and make better decisions.

Tips for staying active to enhance cognitive thinking: Keep track of daily steps, using a pedometer or fitness tracker. Take daily walks. Do group exercise. Get enough sleep Good quality sleep, and enough of it ideally seven to nine hours each night , helps put people in a better mood and gives them the energy they need for the day.

Sleep is also critical for helping store memories, solve problems and concentrate. Tips for getting enough sleep to enhance cognitive thinking: Avoid using a screen before bedtime including phones and laptops. Sleep according to a natural sleep cycle. Participants were recruited from the Lumosity website www.

Individuals who had created an account on the site, but who were not paying subscribers i. Invitations were sent via email to users who engaged with the program on at least three days in the first week after sign-up. All participants who completed the study were compensated with a 6-month membership to Lumosity.

Based on the ongoing study completion rate, recruitment ended when it was estimated that the number of participants enrolled in the study would be sufficient to obtain 5, fully evaluable participants.

In total, 11, individuals consented to take part in the study and completed a baseline pre-test assessment battery. The first participant was randomized on April 27, , and the final participant completed the post-test on April 28, Participants were assigned a treatment condition using a random number generator with equal probabilities of assignment to cognitive training and crosswords control conditions.

Random assignment occurred after the pre-test. An additional participants were excluded because a computer error delayed their randomization into a treatment condition by more than 24 hours, allowing these participants to continue with the Lumosity program in the free user state.

Of the remaining 9, participants randomized into a treatment condition, 5, The training platform was designed to direct each participant, upon logging in each day, to either cognitive training or crossword puzzles based on his or her group assignment.

However, in some cases participants in the crossword control group were able to access cognitive training. As a result, control participants were removed from the primary analysis because they accessed the cognitive training program during the study period Fig 1.

See Table 1 for demographic characteristics of the fully evaluable cohorts in both conditions. Age, gender, and educational attainment were evenly distributed across the groups. All participants were instructed to log into the website and do one session per day of their activity cognitive training for the treatment group or crossword puzzles for the control group , 5 days a week for 10 weeks.

Daily email participation reminders were sent to all participants during the study period. The Lumosity cognitive training program was used as the treatment condition in this study. Treatment participants in this study received the same training experience that Lumosity subscribers received over the same period of time.

Daily training sessions included five cognitive training tasks. On any given day, the five tasks for that particular session were chosen by an algorithm that attempted to optimize a balance of training activities such that tasks were presented in clusters across days without repeating individual tasks on a given day.

One five-task session typically took approximately 15 minutes to complete. Outside of this session, participants could opt to do additional training with any of the 49 available tasks in an a la carte fashion.

The cognitive training tasks each target a particular core cognitive ability and are grouped into five categories by target domain: speed of processing, attention, memory, flexibility, and problem solving.

Many of these tasks are described in detail elsewhere in the literature [ 25 — 27 , 29 , 30 , 35 — 37 ], and a description of all tasks is included as Supporting Information S1 Appendix.

Participants randomized into the active control group received a daily session timed at a minimum of 15 minutes.

They were instructed to complete as many crossword puzzles as possible in the allotted time. If a participant completed a puzzle within the minute time period, the crossword application would provide a new puzzle.

At the end of the minute period, participants were able to continue to work on the current puzzle for as long as they chose but were not given additional puzzles that day.

The crossword puzzles were produced by professional crossword constructors and presented in a web-based crosswords platform. Constructors were asked to create crosswords that were of medium difficulty, approximately equivalent to a Thursday New York Times crossword puzzle note: the New York Times puzzles increase in difficulty throughout the week, culminating with the most difficult puzzle on Saturday.

Participants filled out the puzzles by typing the answers in the appropriate boxes. Feedback about correct and incorrect responses was given immediately following submission of a completed crossword.

The puzzles were placed in a website frame that replicated the look and feel of the cognitive training website in order match as closely as possible the experience across the two conditions. See the Supporting Information S1 File for additional details on how engagement time was estimated.

Secondary analyses based on total time are included in S1 File. Outcomes were assessed using a battery of seven neuropsychological tests, as well as a participant-reported outcomes survey. The primary outcome measure used in this study was change in aggregate cognitive performance, as measured by the Grand Index described further below of the neuropsychological assessment battery, from before to after the week study period.

Secondary outcome measures included change in performance on each of the subtests in the neuropsychological battery and changes in responses to the survey.

The assessments and survey were administered online in a pre-test one day prior to beginning the treatment or control condition. Participants were directed to take the post-test 70 days later, one day following the end of the treatment or control. Seven neuropsychological assessments were used in this study.

These assessments required participants to recall a sequence of randomized spatial locations in either forward or reverse order. This task was designed to measure divided visual attention and required participants to recall the locations of briefly presented target letters while ignoring distractors.

See the Supporting Information S2 Appendix for more detailed information about the design of these assessments. Importantly, none of the tasks used in the outcome assessment battery were presented during training. Rather, outcome assessments were implemented as measures of transfer to underlying cognitive abilities.

Our assessment scaling procedure follows standard rank-based normalization approaches used in well-established IQ tests [ 42 , 43 ].

Normalization tables were created based on the pre-test data from participants who completed both the pre- and post-tests, including control participants who completed some amount of cognitive training during the study period.

Norms were generated in 5-year age bins and tables were created within each age bin for each assessment. These normalization tables were created by taking the empirically observed percentile rank for each raw score and finding the value corresponding to that percentile from a normal distribution with a mean of and standard deviation of 15 i.

This sum was then transformed using the same percentile rank normalization procedure described above. Participants also completed a survey including nine questions related to specific cognitive failures [ 44 ] and successes as well as emotional status.

Participants took the survey immediately after completing the neuropsychological test battery, once before beginning the study period pre-test and once upon completion of the study post-test.

Because this question did not apply equally to the treatment and control groups, and was not included in the original protocol, it was removed from the analysis. For completeness, responses to this question are included along with the rest of the study data in the attached S1 Dataset.

The survey items are presented in the Results section. Our primary hypothesis was that the treatment program would lead to greater improvements in aggregate cognitive performance compared to the active control, as measured by the neuropsychological assessment battery.

If this hypothesis were correct, we would expect to see larger improvements from pre-test to post-test on the Grand Index of the assessment battery for the treatment group relative to the control group.

Such differences in change scores were observed. The mean increase on the Grand Index score post-pre in the treatment group was 5. Error bars represent confidence intervals bootstrapped over , iterations.

Mean change scores and error bars are based on unadjusted summary statistics. P value is based on results from the ANCOVA analysis described in Table 2. The difference in composite Grand Index change scores between the two groups treatment vs. control was evaluated with an ANCOVA model measuring the effect of group, controlling for the pre-test score.

Pre-test score was included as a covariate to control for regression to the mean effects as well as any effects of baseline performance. These results indicate that the cognitive training treatment condition was more effective than the crosswords control for improving cognitive performance on the assessment battery on an aggregate basis.

To ensure that the exclusion of control participants who did some cognitive training with the treatment program see Participants section in Methods could not explain these results, we performed an additional set of ANCOVA analyses S1 File.

The pattern of results and conclusions remained consistent across all comparisons see S1 File , indicating that these exclusions could not explain the main result that cognitive training led to larger gains in cognitive performance compared to crosswords.

In the primary analysis conducted here, no outliers were removed. All completed assessments were included in the analysis.

In order to ensure that outliers did not play an important role in the findings, we completed a secondary outlier analysis see S1 File. In this analysis, any raw scores that were outside the range of three standard deviations above or below the mean were removed prior to further statistical analysis.

The conclusions remained the same across all subtests included in the battery. The Grand Index change score analysis was recalculated for participants with no outliers. Based on this analysis, outlier effects could not account for the results of this study.

Based on the significant main effect on our primary outcome measure, we performed secondary analyses consisting of additional ANCOVA models for each assessment.

The models revealed that the cognitive training treatment group improved significantly more than the crossword puzzles control group on five of the seven assessments. There was no statistically significant difference between the groups for the Two-Target Search task.

Fig 3 provides an illustration of the unadjusted change scores for each assessment for both groups. ANCOVA model p values and effect sizes along with unadjusted pre-test means and change scores for each assessment are shown in Table 2.

P values are based on results from the ANCOVA analyses listed in Table 2. If the cognitive training treatment was more effective than playing crossword puzzles for improving cognitive abilities, we may observe a larger effect of active days of study engagement for the treatment condition compared to the control condition.

In order to test for a group difference in the effect of active days, we constructed a general linear model predicting Grand Index change score from pre-test score, treatment group, active days, and the group-by-active-days interaction.

Lines represent estimates from the general linear model including effects of group, active day, and the group-by-active-days interaction. The estimated total time participants engaged with their respective conditions provides an additional measure of compliance. These results indicate that participants in both conditions on average complied with the instructions to engage for at least 15 minutes per day, 5 days per week for 10 weeks See S1 File for matched sample analyses demonstrating that the observed group differences in overall cognitive performance improvement are not explained by differences in the distributions of total engagement time.

Of the 4, participants included in the analyses above, 4, In order to calculate change scores on the survey, participant responses were first numerically coded on a scale from 0 to 4, with the scale always ranging from 0 as the most negative response to 4 as the most positive response.

Responses to questions 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, and 9 were reverse coded to maintain consistency of response coding across all questions i. An average of the scores was taken for both pre- and post-tests as an overall measure of self-reported real-world cognitive performance and emotional status.

The differences between pre- and post-test overall scores and scores on each question were analyzed. The hypothesis that participants in the treatment group would show greater self-reported improvements in cognition and emotional status relative to control participants was tested via an ANCOVA model measuring the effect of group treatment vs.

control on the change in average survey score, controlling for average pre-test score. These results indicate that, overall, the cognitive training treatment was more effective than the crosswords control for improving self-reported real-world cognition and emotional status.

For all nine questions, both groups tended to report improvements following study participation, compared to the pre-test. The changes were significant for both groups on all questions except for question 4 memory for a new name.

Results for each question are presented in Table 3. The three largest group differences were on questions 1, 3 and 6, all of which were related to concentration. The findings of this study are consistent with the extant literature on cognitive training that shows that progressively challenging, targeted cognitive training can be an effective tool for improving core cognitive abilities including speed of processing [ 13 ], working memory [ 46 ], and fluid reasoning [ 10 ].

The results presented here extend previous findings by demonstrating that a cognitive training program targeting a variety of cognitive capacities with different exercises can be more effective than crossword puzzles at improving a broad range of cognitive abilities.

In addition, improvement on the overall measure of cognitive function used as the primary outcome measure in this study—the Grand Index for the assessment battery—was more than twice as large in the cognitive training group as it was in the crossword puzzles control group.

Thus, for improving a variety of core cognitive abilities, the treatment used in this trial was more effective than crossword puzzles. Another approach to appreciating the magnitude of these results is to contextualize them in the distribution of scores on the outcome measures.

We observe that participants in the training group improve by 2. Given that the scores are scaled on a mean ± 15 sd scale, we can evaluate how far an average participant would move within the population distribution for their age based on moving a given number of points.

In this case, 2. This is a potentially meaningful move within the distribution. A significant group-by-active-days interaction was observed in this study, such that an additional active day engaging with the cognitive training intervention was related to larger gains on the cognitive battery composite score compared to an additional active day engaging with crossword puzzles Fig 4.

This suggests that additional training could lead to larger gains. While it is unlikely that the linear relation holds indefinitely i. In addition to the enhanced performance observed in the cognitive training group on the neuropsychological measures of cognitive function, participants in this group also self-reported experiencing benefits that were significantly greater than those reported by participants in the active control.

These participant-reported improvements were particularly strong on questions related to the ability to concentrate. These results suggest that participants in the treatment group experienced benefits from the training in their everyday lives.

Crossword puzzles were chosen as the active control because they are commonly believed to be a cognitively stimulating activity that is good for brain health [ 31 , 32 ].

This is important because it has been suggested that belief in the efficacy of a training intervention could affect effort and performance on testing outcomes [ 47 ].

While not as large as the gains seen in the treatment group, participants in the crosswords control group also showed improvements in cognitive performance.

Without a no-contact control group in this study, it is not possible to conclusively determine whether these improvements in the active control condition were due to practice effects, placebo effects, real treatment effects, or some combination of these. Further study will be needed to better understand the benefits of crossword puzzles for maintenance and enhancement of cognition.

It is worth noting that participants in the crosswords group improved slightly more than the cognitive training group on a measure of grammatical reasoning. There are several reasons why the treatment program might have outperformed crossword puzzles in enhancing cognitive function. First, the cognitive training program is specifically targeted to core cognitive functions.

This distinguishes the treatment from crossword puzzles, which are not designed with the goal of cognitive enhancement. Another central feature of the cognitive training program studied here is that it is progressively challenging —that is, many of the tasks explicitly increase in difficulty as the individual improves, while others encourage the individual to perform at threshold by rewarding increasingly faster and more accurate performance see S1 Appendix.

This follows a long-established tenet in the psychological literature, that learning conditions are optimized when the task is challenging, but not prohibitively difficult [ 48 , 49 ].

Task variety and novelty are also potentially important. In the case of crossword puzzles, participants are primarily involved in vocabulary retrieval, challenging a more limited set of neural pathways.

In the cognitive training program studied here, participants are challenged to engage with a variety of cognitive tasks that challenge different neural processing systems and do so in different ways. This variety limits the opportunity to solve the tasks with a single task-specific strategy, thus encouraging the learning of new strategies and the development of new neural connections.

We noted that there have been several studies that have reported not finding benefits from cognitive training. The only other similarly powered study that did not find positive results is a study that recruited 11, participants through a BBC television show and collected data online [ 17 ].

The authors concluded that brain training had no measureable benefits. Several key aspects of that study differ from the one presented here.

First, neither of the two treatment conditions they used had been studied empirically prior to that experiment. As we demonstrate in this study, not all cognitively stimulating activities are equally effective for enhancing cognition, and it is possible that other programs not examined in their study are more effective.

Also, the average amount of training exposure in the BBC study was less than half of that in this study. This is an important distinction as results of this study indicate that amount of training is related to the magnitude of gains in cognitive performance Fig 4. Our results represent statistically significant improvements in cognitive processes through training.

This study included a sufficiently large number of participants and enough training to reliably detect these effects. As has been noted previously [ 50 ], most cognitive training studies that have shown null results have not been powered in such a way that either a positive or a null outcome would be informative, and often include quite short training periods.

In the broader context of factors influencing cognitive processes i. Further research will be needed to understand how the current effects extrapolate over much longer training periods.

In this study, There was little difference in dropout rates between the two groups, and supplemental analyses S1 File that equated the engagement characteristics of completers from both groups demonstrated that these differences in dropout between the two groups could not explain the results.

This study utilized an entirely online design. The online methodology is ecologically valid, since most users in the real world experience the program at home or in some other personal environment outside a laboratory or clinic.

In traditional laboratory-based training studies, participants experience considerable contact with study personnel. Contact with study personnel may lead to lower rates of loss to follow up. However, this personal interaction introduces a variable that could affect the results and is not reflective of how most normal, healthy adults use these programs.

A possible limitation of the current study is that it does not isolate specific mechanisms. For example, adaptive difficulty may play an important role in driving the transfer of training [ 51 ]. Many of the tasks in the cognitive training program were explicitly adaptive i.

The two conditions differed on other dimensions as well. The cognitive training program incorporated a variety of tasks that targeted specific cognitive functions, while the crosswords condition did not.

Future research is needed to more fully elucidate the relative contributions of particular components of activities that lead to improvements in cognitive performance.

Future studies could also extend the cognitive domains tested. Our neuropsychological assessment battery was relatively comprehensive across a variety of domains, but not every possible dimension of cognition was addressed.

For example, this battery did not include any assessment explicitly targeting learning e. Research on training to improve cognitive skills is not complete, and there remain many open questions. The ability to efficiently collect large data sets in controlled experiments over the Internet may prove crucial to answering the open questions related to cognitive training in the future.

The first supplementary analysis is an ANCOVA analysis that includes participants assigned to the control group who engaged in some cognitive training during the study period. The second supplementary analysis describes how engagement time is estimated in the two conditions and provides a paired-matching analysis that controls for the total time spent engaging with the two conditions.

The third supplementary analysis includes an outlier removal procedure. We would like to acknowledge the efforts of all the dedicated people who have worked to create Lumosity. We would like to thank Kacey Ballard Corrado and Tyler Hinman for their work to facilitate the creation of the crossword puzzles system that was used as the control condition.

We would also like to thank Sylvia Bunge, Murali Doraiswamy, Jerri Edwards, Amit Etkin, Anett Gyurak, Christine Hooker, Joseph Ventura, and Mike Walker for their thoughtful comments on the manuscript.

Conceived and designed the experiments: JLH FF RAN MET DAS MS. Performed the experiments: JLH FF DAS MS.

Analyzed the data: DAS KK. Wrote the paper: JLH RAN MET DAS KK FF MS. Browse Subject Areas? Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field. Article Authors Metrics Comments Media Coverage Reader Comments Figures. Abstract Background A variety of studies have demonstrated gains in cognitive ability following cognitive training interventions.

Methods The present study evaluated an online cognitive training program comprised of 49 exercises targeting a variety of cognitive capacities. Conclusion Taken together, these results indicate that a varied training program composed of a number of tasks targeted to different cognitive functions can show transfer to a wide range of untrained measures of cognitive performance.

Trial Registration ClinicalTrials. gov NCT Greenlee, University of Regensburg, GERMANY Received: March 4, ; Accepted: July 8, ; Published: September 2, Copyright: © Hardy et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited Data Availability: The study data for the statistical comparisons of outcomes for cognitive training relative to crosswords are in a CSV file in Supporting Information.

Introduction Recent evidence suggests that engaging in cognitively challenging activities can positively impact brain function, with studies demonstrating behavioral [ 1 , 2 ], physiological [ 3 , 4 ], and real-world functional [ 5 , 6 ] gains.

Methods Ethics statement Participants provided informed consent by clicking a dialogue box on a digital consent form prior to participation in the study.

Trial registration The study was registered on ClinicalTrials. Participants Participants were recruited from the Lumosity website www. Download: PPT. Table 1. Demographic information for fully evaluable participants. Treatment and control groups All participants were instructed to log into the website and do one session per day of their activity cognitive training for the treatment group or crossword puzzles for the control group , 5 days a week for 10 weeks.

Cognitive training treatment. Crossword puzzles control. Outcome measures Outcomes were assessed using a battery of seven neuropsychological tests, as well as a participant-reported outcomes survey.

Neuropsychological assessment battery. Assessment scaling procedure. Participant-reported outcomes. Results Primary outcome measure Our primary hypothesis was that the treatment program would lead to greater improvements in aggregate cognitive performance compared to the active control, as measured by the neuropsychological assessment battery.

Fig 2. Change in composite score Grand Index for the cognitive training treatment and crossword puzzle control conditions. Table 2. Neuropsychological assessment baseline means, change scores, and effect sizes. Individual assessments Based on the significant main effect on our primary outcome measure, we performed secondary analyses consisting of additional ANCOVA models for each assessment.

Effects of amount of engagement If the cognitive training treatment was more effective than playing crossword puzzles for improving cognitive abilities, we may observe a larger effect of active days of study engagement for the treatment condition compared to the control condition.

Fig 4. Change in composite score Grand Index by number of active days in treatment and control conditions. Participant-reported outcomes Of the 4, participants included in the analyses above, 4, Discussion The findings of this study are consistent with the extant literature on cognitive training that shows that progressively challenging, targeted cognitive training can be an effective tool for improving core cognitive abilities including speed of processing [ 13 ], working memory [ 46 ], and fluid reasoning [ 10 ].

Supporting Information. S1 CONSORT Checklist.