Lumosity, the online cognitive training and neuroscience research company, is presenting today at the annual 2013 Society for Neuroscience meeting data on its set of online neuropsychological battery of assessments, the Brain Performance Test (BPT). The poster presentation titled, "Measuring Training-Related Changes in Cognitive Performance with a Repeatable Online Assessment Battery," examined the reliability of the BPT and the variability in training dose and improvement. The study found that the BPT is a reliable assessment, and that larger doses of cognitive training are associated with greater improvements on the BPT. The study also found that training gains were more strongly predictive of improvements on the assessment battery than the training dose alone.
"We created the Brain Performance Test with the goal of improving the way we measure the transfer effects of cognitive training to other tasks and real-world outcomes," said Daniel Sternberg, Ph.D., Data Scientist at Lumosity and lead author of the study. "These results are interesting because they demonstrate that training gains are a powerful predictor of transfer - replicating previous findings from other labs, but in a much larger sample."
The study included a final sample of 5,870 participants between the ages of 15-75 who took the pre-test and post-test at least 70 days apart. The study found that those who trained more than the median participants - approximately 10.5 hours over a 10-week period - saw increases in improvements on core cognitive abilities compared to those who trained less.
Current ongoing research using the BPT includes a randomized controlled study, multiple studies comparing the effects of different training programs on training improvements, and assessment validation studies.
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