Topic 8: Brain Training Flashcards
What is experience dependent plasicity?
many examples of experience dependent plasticity related to various things people end up doing with their lives
e.g. learning a second language, a music instrument, London cab drivers vs. bus drivers study etc.
also apparent in experimental situations (e.g., the Greebles study, video game studies, etc.)
What are the mechanisms of neuroplasticity?
neurogenesis
long-term potentiation/depression (LTP/LTD)
recovery of function (e.g. stroke damage)
What are examples of commonplace things that “change your brain”?
acquiring a classically conditioned response
learning a new fact
deciding you do/do not have a preference for something which may then change your expectations in the future
How do we operationalize brain training?
could measure accuracy, response time, structural connectivity, functional connectivity, volume, self reports, etc.
is faster always better? (e.g. what about divergent thinking)?
we tend to be data-centric without always considering what the data would actually mean (does taking 10,000 steps/day actually improve your health?)
How do we evaluate brain training?
issues related to generalizability
separating correlation vs. causation (parallels with video games discussion)
transfer effects (near and far)
active training vs. passive control?
Why is working memory usually the focus of brain training?
working memory is an important domain general skills and may mediate other important cognitive abilities beyond simply retaining information (e.g., fluid intelligence, impulse control, etc.)
although this means the average person may want to improve their working memory certain populations may stand to benefit more than someone from the general population
What are examples of why working memory is the focus of brain training?
Westerberg et al. (2007): populations with stroke recovery
Conklin et al. (2015): potential to reduce cognitive deficits that ca accompany chemotherapy (described as a mental fog ad sometimes referred to as “chemo brain”)
Bickel et al. (2011): working memory training changes delay discounting behavior within a sample addicted to stimulants
What are examples of behavioral evidence of working memory training?
examples of typical WM training tasks
would improving on just these tasks really matter?
if not, how confident are we that we’re seeing anything beyond what might be quite specific practice effects?
even if we find some domain-specific transfer effects, how much would that be expected to change our overall cognitive ability?
Harrison et al. (2013): increases in WM capacity related to training do not seem to correlate with changes to fluid intelligence
What is the n-back task?
requires you to hold the identify of the last “n” (number, which can vary) stimuli that were presented in working memory
on each trial, a judgment must be made as to whether or not the stimulus being presented on the current trial is the same or different as the stimulus that was shown “n” trials previously
What are the manipulations in the n-back task?
task difficulty/load can be varied by increasing or decreasing the comparison window (e.g., 1-back involves identifying whether the stimulus on the previous trial is the same as the one currently being presented)
this requires constant updating (i.e. cognitive control), which probably makes it better suited for testing working memory than a simple digit span
What was the Takeuchi et al. (2010) study for looking for neurological evidence for working memory training?
using DTI, found a correlation between the amount of increased “coherence” of white matter areas thought to be important for working memory (intraparietal sulcus, anterior corpus callosum) and total time spent training
What was the Karbach and Verhaeghen (2014) meta-analysis on working memory training?
do the studies that report large effect sizes tend to be larger or smaller (in terms of sample size)?
why might that be?
once again, what implications (if any) would that have for interpreting the evidence for the efficacy of brain training?
does there seem to be a difference between passive and active controls?
what about differences between younger and older adults?
any relevant implications?
What is the Simons et al. (2016) study on transfer effects?
Simons et al. (2016) report an apparent discrepancy in the literature, in which two meta-analyses find rather different results, which are presumed to relate to methodological issues
in their review, they report finding limited evidence for (particularly far) transfer effects
What is publication bias?
refers to the fact that papers with “positive” results (e.g., in which groups/conditions were found to be statistically significantly different) are more likely to be published than null results
How is the flanker task used as evidence for experience-dependent effects?
the version of the flanker task that we discussed in the Green and Baveller (2003) is just one form this paradigm can take
the original version used letter-based stimuli presented in a row, which have also sometimes been substituted for various symbols (e.g., shapes, color, arrows, etc.)
the flanker task produces compatibility effects, in which faster responses are produced when the targets and distractors are consistent (and vice versa)
the magnitude of these effects (e.g. how much of an RT cost/benefit is observed) are often used to make inferences about how deeply the distractors were processed
What is the Wang, Yang, Moreau, and Muggleton (2017) study on attention and sports?
compared performance across two types of athletes, playing either: open/interactive sports (involve more unpredictability in terms of visual stimuli) and closed sports (which involve less unpredictability)
What were the results of the Wang, Yang, Moreau, and Muggleton (2017) study on attention and sports?
the badminton players performed better than the track players in three respects during a flanker task:
1. faster RTs (overall)
2. smaller variability in RTs
3. smaller incongruence cost
these results suggest that, like the video game players, badminton players were better able to suppress interference from irrelevant information (while also maintaining faster/more consistent responses)
What was the study by Bashore et al. (2018) on football players?
compared 283 top NCAA football players to non-athlete matched controls
no difference across groups in overall RT, through the football players showed a smaller “cost” for incongruent trials (~18% less)
1/5 of the football players showed less of an incongruent cost than the best performing control participant
suggests that, like the badminton players, football players are better able to suppress irrelevant information and/or act on relevant information
What were the results of the study by Bashore et al. (2018) on the positions of football players?
while both offensive and defensive players were better than controls, defenseive players showed reduced interference effects (relative to offensive)
why might this be? the authors interpreted this as relating to the greater unpredictability associated with defensive plays
while we should keep in mind that this is correlational and therefore can’t speak to causation, experience-dependent plasticity may be a plausible explanation
