Over the last few days we have seen an engag­ing con­ver­sa­tion going on. In a cou­ple of posts, rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Posit Sci­ence brain fit­ness gym have left com­ments that have prompted me to ask a series of detailed ques­tions. I will present those ques­tions in a post, so they are eas­ier to find.

Eric, Henry: please address these ques­tions, so we all con­tribute to help­ing con­sumers and insti­tu­tions nav­i­gate through this emerg­ing land­scape of “brain fit­ness gyms” and sep­a­rate what is real today from what is promis­ing and may be real tomor­row.
A) Ques­tions posted in The Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram DVD post.

Hello Eric, thanks for stop­ping by. We rec­om­mend users check our 10-Question Eval­u­a­tion Check­list, because there is no research enough today to “pre­scribe” any spe­cific inter­ven­tion for every­one. Each user must decide what may be the best tool for him or her.There are many impor­tant cog­ni­tive skills to take care of, so a very nar­row inter­ven­tion is not nec­es­sar­ily what every sin­gle per­son would ben­e­fit from, jus­ti­fy­ing time com­mit­ment and expense.Let me ask you
1– how you you know what ben­e­fits Arlene has in mind? if she is look­ing to reduce like­li­hood of poten­tially devel­op­ing Alzheimer’s symp­toms, for exam­ple, phys­i­cal exer­cise or a vari­ety of socially and men­tally stim­u­lat­ing activ­i­ties have more research sup­port than any spe­cific computer-based program

2– how many stud­ies have been pub­lished as of today in peer-reviewed jour­nals sup­port­ing the valid­ity of your program

3– what is the median age for peo­ple in pub­lished stud­ies? what may be rel­e­vant for peo­ple in their 70s may not be the top pri­or­ity for peo­ple in their 40s or 50

4– What is the use pro­to­col in pub­lished stud­ies? hours of train­ing per week?

5– Does pub­lished research show far trans­fer into non-trained domains such as visual mem­ory and exec­u­tive functions?

6– can you pro­vide an overview of all major cog­ni­tive skills and where audi­tory pro­cess­ing fits in

7– Have you seen the pub­lished research back­ing other pro­grams such as Cogmed, Space­Fortress, cog­ni­tive ther­apy, biofeed­back? I find it sur­pris­ing that (despite the appar­ent great qual­ity of the IMPACT study, not pub­lished yet), you can make claims like the ones you make in your comment.

Look­ing for­ward your response.

B) Ques­tions posted in the Inter­view with ACTIVE’s Jerri Edwards post.

Henry, thank you for your com­ment. It adds good con­text, and does well in encour­ag­ing more com­pa­nies invest in good research. It also raises sev­eral ques­tions that I’d love you to address:
1– Com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing has been around for a while, with a vari­ety of approaches. You may also have read my inter­views with Daniel Gopher and Torkel Kling­berg, for exam­ple. It would be highly sur­pris­ing to learn that some of the require­ments to make it work have been patented, as you seem to imply.

2– It is pub­lic infor­ma­tion that Posit Sci­ence has been work­ing on a visual pro­cess­ing pro­gram for over a year. And this acqui­si­tion just hap­pened. So the obvi­ous ques­tions are a) how are you going to inte­grate 2 dif­fer­ent prod­ucts and approaches, b) and in such a short time­frame, by March?

3– In fact, more research will be needed to show the effi­cacy of what­ever you launch in March, which is not the same that has been used in the ACTIVE and other trials.

4– May I sug­gest, to you and all other devel­op­ers, that we need to see more solid con­trols? watch­ing some edu­ca­tional DVDs is not the best high-quality con­trol that will allow you to claim your cog­ni­tive train­ing has been shown to be bet­ter than other cog­ni­tive train­ing prod­ucts, sim­ply that cog­ni­tive train­ing itself works.

Thank you.

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For con­text, this is our 10-Question Pro­gram Eval­u­a­tion Checklist

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