Can an online game boost your brainpower? Commercial companies turn tidy profits selling games that claim to improve memory and sharpen thinking skills. But the scientific evidence for their effectiveness is muddled at best. “Does cognitive training work or not work? And why do we have paper after paper coming out with mixed results?” asks Aaron Seitz, PhD, director of the Brain Game Center for Mental Fitness and Well-Being at the University of California (UC), Riverside.
Seitz intends to get to the bottom of that question. In a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded collaboration with Susanne Jaeggi, PhD, director of the Working Memory and Plasticity Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine, Seitz is recruiting 30,000 volunteers for a memory study to explore what elements of brain-training interventions might improve memory, and for whom.
Seitz’s background is in the field of perceptual learning, the process by which our sensory abilities are improved by experience (imagine a budding musician learning to distinguish between musical notes). Along the way, he realized that commercial brain training programs borrowed general concepts from perceptual learning but failed to incorporate the latest scientific discoveries from the field. He launched the Brain Game Center in 2014 to bridge that gap. Along with research scientists from psychology and cognitive neuroscience, his lab includes computer scientists and programmers who design assessments and online brain training games that are scientifically rigorous and fun to play. His current projects span perceptual and cognitive abilities including hearing, vision, and working memory.
“I wanted to take what I knew from perceptual learning and apply it to a training program that’s meant to help people in their daily lives,” Seitz says, of how the Brain Game Center began.
Sharpening sight
Seitz earned his PhD in cognitive and neural systems from Boston University in 2003 and joined the faculty at UC Riverside in 2008. Much of his early work focused on visual perceptual learning. Many previous studies of vision improvement had been shown to improve eyesight on laboratory tests, he says. But they often failed to transfer any notable benefits to people outside the lab. Hoping to change that, Seitz developed a vision training game called ULTIMEYES that combined multiple proven approaches from the field of perceptual learning. The game presented a diverse set of stimuli, optimized the presentation of those stimuli, used consistent reinforcement, and drew on input from other senses to facilitate visual learning. He tested the game on a group of people for whom sharp sight is vital: the UC Riverside baseball team. During the fall, 19 team members came to his lab for 30 training sessions lasting 25 minutes each. After training, the players improved in their ability to read eye charts in the lab. The following season, they also showed improvements on the field: fewer strikeouts and more runs created (a measure of batting performance) compared with their own stats from the previous season and compared with the rest of the league (Deveau, J., et al., Current Biologyopens in new window, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2014).
Seitz acknowledges that the study had limitations, including a small sample size and no control group. “But it was an exciting proof of concept,” he says. “We wanted to demonstrate that we could train someone in the lab, test them in their normal activities, and start evaluating whether there was transfer [of the training effects].”
Since then he has continued to study vision training and has developed another vision training game, called Sightseeing. While the games are designed to be fun, they are rooted in research. With Marcello Maniglia, PhD, an assistant research psychologist in the lab, Seitz aims to understand what elements of training programs translate to real-world improvements in vision, both for people who want to sharpen their normal-range vision as well as those with visual impairments. “We want to be as rigorous as possible in comparing different approaches in training so we can understand the secret sauce that leads to transfer of learning,” Maniglia says.
To do that, they take a holistic view of sensory perception. Vision isn’t only about the eyes; it involves other cognitive functions as well—such as attentional processes that allow a person to keep their eyes on the ball while tuning out what’s going on in the stands. Of course, attention isn’t just important for athletes. One of Maniglia’s current projects is developing training programs to improve vision in people with macular degeneration, which causes loss in the center of the field of vision. “Macular degeneration doesn’t just reduce vision but leads to a complete change in the way the person’s attention system is interacting with the world,” he says. “One of our ideas is that a vision training program that takes into account higher-order functions like attention and cognition would probably be more effective.”
Auditory learning
Seitz takes a similarly broad view in his work on hearing. His approach is novel in the field of auditory perception, says E. Sebastian Lelo de Larrea-Mancera, a fifth-year doctoral student who focuses on hearing. “The distinction between perception and cognition is very clear in the boxes we draw in textbooks, but it’s not very clear when you look at how people behave,” he says. “We’re interested in all of the cognitive resources that can be put to the task of hearing.”
Initially, Seitz and his collaborators set out to create a hearing training game similar to the one he’d devised for vision. But they quickly realized they needed to take a step back. Traditional hearing assessments weren’t sensitive enough to measure improvements within the range of normal hearing, he says. And they didn’t capture all of the dimensions that might be important for a person’s experience of hearing and interpreting sounds. For instance, Seitz says, as many as half of people who say they have trouble hearing in real-world situations like noisy restaurants actually do fine on audiological exams. “A lot of the established procedures to measure hearing are 80 or 90 years old and haven’t really been updated with a newer understanding—not only of how the ear works, but of how the brain works,” he says. “We want to understand the dimensions of hearing that are most important for predicting how somebody is going to be able to perform in their daily listening scenarios.”
To improve on those tests, Seitz and colleagues developed the Portable Automated Rapid Testing program, which is designed to assess a range of auditory processing abilities (Gallun, F. J., et al., Proceedings of Meetings on Acousticsopens in new window, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2018). He and Larrea-Mancera are continuing to fine-tune and validate the test, which takes advantage of tablets and smartphones to produce sophisticated yet accessible hearing tests that don’t require soundproof testing labs or professional audiologists. The tool is being used by researchers and some audiology training programs and could potentially be used by people to test their own hearing at home.
At the same time, the researchers are moving ahead with the development of an app called Listen, a brain training game designed to sharpen a player’s hearing. Players travel a sci-fi landscape, dodging obstacles that come their way. To avoid the threats, players must respond to sound cues, such as jumping when a pitch rises, or turning left when they detect a sound on their left. The game is adaptive, becoming more difficult as players improve in their ability to distinguish between sounds. Seitz and Larrea-Mancera are testing the game in people without hearing deficits as well as in those who have hearing loss related to aging or traumatic brain injury.
Can memory be trained?
Meanwhile, lab members are pushing forward with their memory training study. There’s some evidence to suggest that game playing in general might help hone working memory—the short-term memory that’s used when you hold information in mind as you make actions or decisions, such as repeating a phone number in your head while looking for a pen to write it down with. Testing three different measures of working memory, Seitz, Jaeggi, and colleagues found that gamers performed better than nongamers on all three. Among people who weren’t extreme gamers, the correlation was weaker—but even still, they found that time spent playing video games was associated with working memory improvement (Waris, O., et al., Computers in Human Behavioropens in new window, Vol. 97, No. 1, 2019).
Still, the idea of memory training is somewhat controversial, and research on whether such games lead to real-world benefits has been mixed. Seitz believes that’s partly because the research hasn’t accounted for individual differences in people’s ability to improve through memory training, and partly because previous studies have used too many different research methods, turning the science into an apples-to-oranges comparison. For memory training research to move forward, he says, researchers must start systematically comparing the features of these training programs (Pergher, V., et al., Journal of Cognitive Enhancementopens in new window, Vol. 4, 2020).
He hopes his latest study with Jaeggi and colleagues will do just that, with help from a grant from the NIMH. Coordinating the large-scale project is Anja Pahor, PhD, a former postdoctoral researcher in Seitz’s lab who now serves as project scientist with joint positions at UC Riverside and Jaeggi’s lab at UC Irvine. “It’s really dynamic work, with Dr. Seitz bringing expertise from perceptual learning and Dr. Jaeggi’s team bringing expertise from the realm of working memory training,” she says.
The project began by testing 1,000 participants in the lab. After honing their testing and training measures, the researchers launched the online portion of the study, for which they plan to recruit 30,000 additional participants. They’ll complete questionnaires covering demographics, personality, technology use, and gaming history, as well as a variety of cognitive assessments. Then the games begin. Participants will engage with different variations of memory training through apps developed by the Brain Game Center, each completing 22 training sessions lasting 20 to 30 minutes each.
“Our approach is to collect a large amount of data so we can drill down into the mediating and moderating factors to understand whether transfer of learning occurs and under what circumstances,” Pahor says. For instance, do people who already play video games stand to improve more or less by playing working memory games? Are games more effective in people who have memory deficits, or in those whose memory is within the normal range? Do people benefit from multisensory training programs that feel like video games, or are more straightforward psychological training tasks—without the sounds and graphics of games—more effective for certain populations? “It’s possible that some subgroups might benefit more than others, and certain types of training might be more appropriate for a certain person,” she says.
While the research aims to understand the cognitive components of memory training, Seitz’s team also wants to understand what works (or doesn’t) from a game design perspective. You can “slap a skin on a game,” he says, basically just adding scenery to a series of cognitive training tasks. Or you can have a more immersive experience, with multisensory inputs and interactive characters that players must navigate through the game. “We have some preliminary evidence suggesting that when you just slap a skin on it, it seems to hurt performance. When you do a more immersive game, it seems that there are greater individual differences, but some people see a bigger performance improvement,” Seitz says. If the finding holds, it suggests that game design is just as important as the underlying cognitive building blocks of a training task.
Fortunately, he has a team to help him create games that have the potential to be both fun and effective. His lab employs four full-time programmers who create and tweak the games based on the scientists’ research goals and findings. The lab also includes graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, research scientists, research coordinators, and many undergraduate research assistants—a team that can total as many as 60 or 70 people in a non-pandemic year.
Seitz also heads the Learning and Memory Lab, where he conducts more basic science research on perceptual learning—much of which feeds into the work at the Brain Game Center. Though his projects are wide-ranging, they share a common thread: the idea that by decoding the building blocks of cognitive training tools, they can create apps to help people perform better in their daily lives, whether that’s remembering a grocery list, keeping up with conversation in a noisy restaurant, or hitting more home runs. “We hope to understand the ingredients in training programs that might be more or less effective,” he says, “and in particular, how we can mix those ingredients with individual differences so that everybody gets a recipe that works for them.”
“Lab Work” examines the work of psychologists in research labs.
