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Comment by ajkessler | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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.

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