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Comment by emef | Hacker News Reader

"In the study performed by Susanne M. Jaeggi et. al., study subjects practiced the dual n-back test for about 20 minutes a day for up to 19 days. At the end of that time, the subjects were shown to have increased intelligences (as measured by gF)."

An improvement in intelligence that becomes apparent after only 19 days smells too good to be true. Correct me if I'm wrong, but surely someone that practices IQ test problems will appear to be more intelligent the next time they are evaluated. It seems like something like that might be what they're seeing here, but I don't know enough about this training to say that.

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The effects are test-independent. That was sort of the point of the study. You will certainly get better at the dual-n-back game, but the gains apply elsewhere, not just to game itself. It has much to do (they think) with the interconnectedness of fluid intelligence and working memory.

I wrote about this fairly in depth here: http://www.ajkesslerblog.com/how-to-get-smarter/

Interesting, so the idea is that your short-term/working memory is indicative of your fluid intelligence? Then increasing your working memory increases your intelligence.

Seems reasonable enough.

It would definitely make sense (the more you can hold in memory at one time, the faster you could learn stuff), but I don't think they've actually concluded that's how it works. They are clearly related though.

Another hypothesis is that working memory and fluid intelligence both utilize the same neural paths/network, so an increase in one benefits the other.

The study itself is linked in my article above if you're interested in reading it. It's pretty interesting stuff.

Actually it appears that increasing working memory alone doesn't increase intelligence (from the paper). But doing the 2 tasks together does seem to do the trick.

That's the really contentious part of the claim. There's evidence that these games may make you better at performing certain tasks - but there's very little that video games make you generally smarter.

Nicholas Carr has written a nice piece on this http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/04/grand_theft_att.ph...

Right. This was the first "game" that actually improved intelligence.

The article you linked doesn't have much to do with the claims about dual-n-back. It seems to be referring exclusively to traditional video games, with most of the claimed benefits relating to hand-eye coordination, spacial recognition, reaction times, stimulus processing, etc. Dual-n-back, and improving working memory, is a totally different animal.

Yes, that's one of the main criticisms - that the n-back task is too similar to the Ravens/BOMAT used to measure _Gf_.

See http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#criticism and this paper I haven't incorporated yet which reviews & criticizes a lot of the pro-WM training literature: http://psychology.gatech.edu/renglelab/publications/2010/shi...

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