Individual Differences and Motivational Effects
Why do some people improve on untrained tasks following cognitive training while others do not? One possibility is that there are individual difference factors that play a key role in cognitive training outcomes. The present chapter examines a range of th
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Introduction Reproducibility is an essential feature of high-quality psychological research, and the subfield of cognitive training has produced no shortage of replications and follow-up studies. For example, one intervention developed by two of the authors of this chapter, n-back training, has been used in no less than fourteen studies from other research groups that also examined training in the context of transfer to fluid intelligence (Au et al. 2014). The outcome of these studies, however, is inconsistent: While some studies find improvements in untrained tasks following the intervention, others do not. Although these subsequent studies may not adhere to the level of fidelity with the original research that was attempted in the recent Reproducibility Project (Open Science Collaboration 2015), similar or identical training paradigms and transfer tasks were used. How does one make sense of not only a single failed or successful replication but an entire corpus of divergent results? One potential answer to this conundrum is the use of meta-analytic techniques, as these allow researchers to determine not only whether an intervention has a meaningful effect over a large body of studies but also to reveal potential moderators—such as demographic makeup, pre-existing individual differences, or training dosage— B. Katz (*) • P. Shah Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] M.R. Jones • S.M. Jaeggi School of Education, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] M. Buschkuehl MIND Research Institute, Irvine, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 T. Strobach, J. Karbach (eds.), Cognitive Training, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42662-4_15
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that may influence the outcome of the intervention. However, even the handful of extant meta-analyses (Au et al. 2014; Karbach and Verhaeghen 2014; Melby-Lervåg and Hulme 2013; Schwaighofer et al. 2015) arrive at different conclusions about the efficacy of cognitive training. A brief interrogation of these quantitative reviews makes this outcome unsurprising, considering that each meta-analysis relied on different selection criteria for including studies and somewhat different methodologies to calculate effect sizes. Some debate has occurred regarding the specific procedures used in each of these meta-analyses; however, it is reasonable to suggest that, as long as sensible alternatives exist in methodology that deliver divergent results, meta-analyses of existing studies alone may be insufficient for reaching consensus about the efficacy of cognitive training. In this chapter we suggest an alternate solution to the issues facing cognitive training research. There is compelling evidence that cognitive training is not equally effective for all participants across all studies. Rather, it is likely that certain individual difference factors such as age, baseline performance, socioeconomic status, person
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