A very promis­ing cog­ni­tive train­ing study was pre­sented last week by Helena West­er­berg at the annual meet­ing of the CNS: Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Soci­ety held in San Fran­cisco, and Dr. David Rabiner brings us the highlights.

- Alvaro

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The study was con­ducted with a gen­eral adult pop­u­la­tion, rather than adults diag­nosed with ADHD, as was the case in pre­vi­ous pub­lished work­ing mem­ory train­ing studies,

The study was a ran­dom­ized, con­trolled trial of work­ing mem­ory train­ing con­ducted with 55 younger (20–30 years old) and 45 older (60–70 years old) adults. Par­tic­i­pants were ran­domly assigned to receive 5 weeks of active Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing or a placebo train­ing inter­ven­tion. In the active train­ing group, the dif­fi­culty of the work­ing mem­ory train­ing tasks con­tin­u­ally adjusted to match the individual’s per­for­mance. As a result, indi­vid­u­als were con­sis­tently chal­lenged to per­form at their high­est pos­si­ble level. In the placebo train­ing group, the dif­fi­culty level remained con­stant across the train­ing period such that improve­ments in work­ing mem­ory were not expected to occur.

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Did you read about the recent exper­i­ment where young chimps dis­played amaz­ing visual work­ing mem­ory capa­bil­ity, beat­ing humans?

- You can watch a short video here.

- Lumos Labs has released a very fun game to test your own skills: try out this Chimp Game!

Also, some very good recent news articles:

1) Is it worth going to the mind gym? (New Sci­en­tist). This is one of the best arti­cles we have read in a while (unfor­tu­nately requires subscription).

- “Bird­watch­ing is the brain­child of San Francisco-based Lumos Labs, just one of the dozens of com­pa­nies that have sprung up in recent months to cash in on the “brain-training” craze. Like most of its com­peti­tors, the the­ory behind …”

Com­ments: the arti­cle intro­duces read­ers to much of the research and sci­en­tists we dis­cuss in our blog, such as Torkel Kling­berg’s work and recent results from the IMPACT study. The arti­cle would have been even bet­ter had Daniel Gopher been inter­viewed on his work improv­ing cog­ni­tive per­for­mance of mil­i­tary pilots and bas­ket­ball players.

2) Inno­va­tion: Your Brain Needs Just as Much Exer­cise as Your Body (Fox Busi­ness Network)

- “The mar­ket, how­ever, is still small. Accord­ing to Alvaro Fer­nan­dez , who co-founded mar­ket research and con­sult­ing firm Sharp­Brains, which is focused solely on the field of brain fit­ness, in 2007 the mar­ket was val­ued at $225 mil­lion, which is up from $150 mil­lion in 2005. Fer­nan­dez thinks there is poten­tial for it to surge, reach­ing more than $2 bil­lion by 2016.”

Com­ments:  Very good arti­cle. Those esti­mates refer to the whole brain fit­ness soft­ware mar­ket to assess and train cog­ni­tive skills, includ­ing Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Katz, a San Diego clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist with decades of expe­ri­ence help­ing ADD/ ADHD kids and adults, and for­mer Board Mem­ber of CHADD, and I had a very good meet­ing with a few school super­in­ten­dents on Saturday.

We dis­cussed the research state-of-the-art, cur­rent ADD/ ADHD inter­ven­tions and the future of prevention-driven interventions.

Some high­lights from our talk:

- More and more researchers are com­ing to see that the label “Atten­tion deficit” was prob­a­bly not the most for­tu­nate one. Kids and adults with ADD/ ADHD can pay atten­tion, when they are engaged in cer­tain tasks, so the under­ly­ing prob­lem is not a deficit of attention.

- ADD/ ADHD is not a prob­lem of know­ing, but a prob­lem of doing. The bot­tle­neck may reside in exec­u­tive func­tions such as so-called work­ing mem­ory. The prob­lem is exe­cu­tion, inter­nal­ized behav­ior, not con­cep­tual knowledge.

- For more infor­ma­tion on Exec­u­tive func­tions, you can check the excel­lent review in the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Psy­chi­a­try, of Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg’s book The Exec­u­tive Brain

- Work­ing mem­ory is the abil­ity to hold dif­fer­ent things on line and manip­u­late them in real time in order to solve a prob­lem, com­plete a task…

- When asked if “work­ing mem­ory” and “short-term mem­ory” are the same, Mark explained that they refer to sim­i­lar con­cepts, if not the same, but that researchers stopped using the term “short-term” mem­ory many years ago, to make it clear that it is an active, not pas­sive, skill. In fact, he added, maybe it should be called “work­ing atten­tion” rather than “work­ing memory”.

- We dis­cussed the for­tu­nate trend that many schools are migrat­ing towards a pub­lic health model in help­ing kids with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties and ADD/ ADHD, focus­ing on more pre­ven­tion at early ages than on reac­tive inter­ven­tions to major problems.

- Work­ing mem­ory can be trained by inten­sive and tar­geted Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams sup­ported by the use of computer-based pro­grams, like RoboMemo, the pro­gram that I came to know last year after a great Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can arti­cle that men­tioned their clin­i­cal study with kids with ADD/ ADHD, pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Child and Ado­les­cent Psy­chi­a­try (See research here).

You can read more infor­ma­tion on the sci­ence of Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams.