Cognitive Training

Overview: Cognitive ability determines how well people function successfully in everyday activities. This is especially true in the area of education, where individual differences in cognitive ability have been shown to predict performance in a number of core competency areas, including reading comprehension and quantitative reasoning. While cognitive ability has long been believed to be a stable individual difference variable – perhaps genetically determined – recent work in cognitive neuroscience suggests that cognitive ability can be improved through extensive training. We seek to train and improve peoples' working memory capacity and thus also improve their overall cognitive ability. Based on prior studies, we believe that visuo-spatial working memory training will lead to improvement in other cognitive abilities.

The purpose of our study is to show that because (1) general cognitive ability and visuo-spatial working memory are predictive of quantitative reasoning and (2) general cognitive ability and visuo-spatial working memory can be improved through extensive cognitive training, (3) training on a visuo-spatial working memory task will lead to improvements in quantitative reasoning.

Contact Person: Sy-Yu Chen