Trial reportPsychological research2025
Practice makes perfect, but to what end? Computerised brain training has limited cognitive benefits in healthy ageing.
Trial report in Psychological research, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- The differential effect of strength, cognitive and aerobic training combinations on cognitive performance and functional abilities in elderly with cognitive decline: The Fit4Alz project.The journal of prevention of Alzheimer's disease · 2025Trial
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Whether brain training programmes are effective and have transferable benefits to wider cognitive abilities is controversial, especially in older adult populations. We assessed, in a randomised controlled intervention study, whether a commercially available brain training programme can induce cognitive improvements in a sample of healthy older adults (N = 103). Participants completed a three-month intervention of either an adaptive computerised cognitive training programme (through a brain training app) or active control. Cognition was measured through a comprehensive battery of tasks pre- and post-intervention to assess working memory, processing speed, attention, and language functioning. Participants in the intervention group significantly improved on all tasks that were trained specifically within the brain training programme (i.e. practice effects). However, for the cognitive tasks assessed pre- and post-intervention there was no evidence of any of these practice effects transferring to improvements in cognitive outcome measures compared to the active control group (i.e. transfer effects). Our results indicate that the benefits of brain training programmes appear to be limited to practice effects of trained tasks, while no evidence is found for transfer effects to other, related or unrelated, untrained cognitive tasks.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.