Improving Methodological Standards in Behavioral Interventions for Cognitive Enhancement

Abstract

There is substantial interest in the possibility that cognitive skills can be improved by dedicated behavioral training. Yet despite the large amount of work being conducted in this domain, there is not an explicit and widely-agreed upon consensus around the best methodological practices. This document seeks to fill this gap. We start from the perspective that there are many types of studies that are important in this domain-e.g., feasibility, mechanistic, efficacy, effectiveness. These studies have fundamentally different goals, and, as such, the best-practice methods to meet those goals will also differ. We thus make suggestions in topics ranging from the design and implementation of control groups, to reporting of results, to dissemination and communication, taking the perspective that the best practices are not necessarily uniform across all study types. We also explicitly recognize that there are methodological issues around which we currently lack the theoretical and/or empirical foundation to determine best practices (e.g., as pertains to assessing participant expectations). For these we suggest important routes forward, including greater interdisciplinary collaboration with individuals from domains that face related concerns. Our hope is that these recommendations will greatly increase the rate at which science in this domain advances. I. INTRODUCTION: The past two decades have brought a great deal of attention to the possibility that certain core cognitive abilities, including those related to processing speed, working memory, perception, attention, and general intelligence, can be improved by dedicated behavioral training (

Impact of an Individualized Cognitive Training Intervention in Preschoolers from Poor Homes

“…We implemented a quasi-experimental longitudinal controlled and randomized design, classified as an efficacy study [50] (Figure 1). Children were distributed into intervention (INT) and control (CON) groups and classified as high-and low-performing groups based on the children's baseline performance in three tasks, i.e., inhibitory control, working memory, and planning.…”

“…Running studies in the school context are recommended as good practice [54] and were proven to be feasible and reliable in the field [28,31,32,55].This type of approach allowed us to come and go between the mechanistic and efficacy study questions while testing the lab-based measures in the children's daily real-world contexts [50]. In addition, the friendly context allowed us to access a bigger sample and increase the amount of time spent assessing and training the participants.…”

The Contribution of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to the Understanding of the Effects of Acute Physical Exercise on Cognition

“…Notably, the blinding of participants in exercise studies is exceedingly difficult because the participants notice if they are exercising or not. To minimize the risk of bias arising from not blinding participants (e.g., due to expectation effects), it is recommended that future studies should control appropriately for confounders, for instance, by assessing additional biopsychosocial variables (e.g., sleep, level of arousal, mood) [114][115][116][117][118] and/or a placebo group [116] (e.g., the placebo [sham] group performs the same exercise but without loading [119,120] or an inadequate dose to induce considerable effects [121]) when possible. Furthermore, with respect to the domain of "other bias", we recommend that upcoming studies pay stronger attention to developing a more rigorous study design (see the next Section 4.2, Study characteristics, for a detailed discussion, as well as Figure 4) [33] and better exercise prescription (see Section 4.3, Exercise characteristics, for a detailed discussion).…”

Application of Machine Learning Models for Tracking Participant Skills in Cognitive Training

“…Over the last decade, the scientific topic of improving cognitive capacity by leveraging the plasticity of the brain has gathered both significant interest and controversies regarding effectiveness (Karbach and Unger, 2014;Au et al, 2016;Melby-Lervåg et al, 2016;Simons et al, 2016;Green et al, 2018;Soveri et al, 2018;Redick, 2019). For example, one of the most popular approaches is to train working memory (WM), a limited-capacity system involved in temporary storage and manipulation of information (Baddeley, 2012).…”