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Improving Methodological Standards in Behavioral Interventions for Cognitive Enhancement

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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, and 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 and discuss the fact 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.

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Funding

National Science Foundation (DRL-1641280) to Dr C. Shawn Green; Office of Naval Research grant to Dr. Daphne Bavelier.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

    C. Shawn Green

  2. Psychology and Education Sciences (FPSE) & Campus Biotech, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Daphne Bavelier

  3. Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Arthur F. Kramer

  4. Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

    Arthur F. Kramer

  5. Department of Psychiatry, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Sophia Vinogradov

  6. University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Sophia Vinogradov

  7. University of Minnesota Physicians, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Sophia Vinogradov

  8. Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Ulrich Ansorge

  9. Center for Research on Applied Gerontology & Department of Psychology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA

    Karlene K. Ball

  10. Department of Neurology, University Hospital Essen, University Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

    Ulrike Bingel

  11. Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Jason M. Chein

  12. Cognitive Psychology Unit & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

    Lorenza S. Colzato

  13. Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Lorenza S. Colzato

  14. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Jerri D. Edwards

  15. Developmental and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Andrea Facoetti

  16. Departments of Neurology, Physiology & Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Adam Gazzaley

  17. MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England

    Susan E. Gathercole

  18. Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Paolo Ghisletta

  19. Swiss Distance Learning University, Brig, Switzerland

    Paolo Ghisletta

  20. Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES – Overcoming vulnerability: Life course perspectives, University of Lausanne, Laussane, Switzerland; University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Paolo Ghisletta

  21. Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy

    Simone Gori

  22. Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

    Isabela Granic

  23. Department of Psychology & Department of Physical Therapy, Movement & Rehabilitation Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Charles H. Hillman

  24. Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

    Bernhard Hommel

  25. School of Education and School of Social Sciences, Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Susanne M. Jaeggi

  26. Faculty of Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Philipp Kanske

  27. Department of Psychology, University of Koblenz-Landau, Landau, Germany

    Julia Karbach

  28. Center for Research on Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk (IDeA), Frankfurt, Germany

    Julia Karbach

  29. Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Alan Kingstone

  30. Department of Psychology & Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Gerontology and Vulnerability, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Matthias Kliegel

  31. Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Sweden

    Torkel Klingberg

  32. Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany

    Simone Kühn

  33. School of Optometry & Graduate Group in Vision Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Dennis M. Levi

  34. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Richard E. Mayer

  35. Department of Psychology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Anne Collins McLaughlin

  36. Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Danielle S. McNamara

  37. Rush Institute for Healthy Aging, Rush University, Chicago, IL, USA

    Martha Clare Morris

  38. School of Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Mor Nahum

  39. Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Nora S. Newcombe

  40. Instituto de Ciencias Biomedicas & Instituto de Psiquiatria, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Rogerio Panizzutti

  41. Global Brain Health Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Rogerio Panizzutti

  42. Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Ruchika Shaurya Prakash

  43. Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Albert Rizzo

  44. Institute of Psychology, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany

    Torsten Schubert

  45. Department of Psychology & Brain Game Center, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

    Aaron R. Seitz

  46. Department of Educational Psychology & Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

    Sarah J. Short

  47. Department of Psychiatry and Wellcome Centre for Ethics and the Humanities, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Ilina Singh

  48. Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, USA

    James D. Slotta

  49. Department of Psychology, Medical School Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Tilo Strobach

  50. Centre for Educational Neuroscience, Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Michael S. C. Thomas

  51. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Elizabeth Tipton

  52. Department of Statistics and Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Elizabeth Tipton

  53. Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Xin Tong

  54. Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

    Haley A. Vlach

  55. VA San Diego Healthcare System, San Diego, CA, USA

    Julie Loebach Wetherell

  56. University of California-San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

    Julie Loebach Wetherell

  57. Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Anna Wexler

  58. Institute for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, University Hospital and University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Claudia M. Witt

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Correspondence to C. Shawn Green.

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Conflict of Interest

The following authors have declared conflict(s) of interest. Bavelier is a founding partner and on the scientific advisory board of Akili Interactive, Boston; Vinogradov is a consultant for Posit Science Corp, Alkermes, Inc., and Mindstrong, Inc.; Ball owns stock in the Visual Awareness Research Group (formerly Visual Awareness, Inc.) and Posit Science, Inc., the companies that market the Useful Field of View Test and speed of processing training software (now the Double Decision exercise in BrainHQ), and is a member of the Posit Science Scientific Advisory Board; Gazzaley is a co-founder, scientific advisor, and BOD member for Akili Interactive Lab and has several patents filed at UCSF for video game enhancement technologies; Jaeggi has an indirect financial interest in the MIND Research Institute, Irvine, CA, whose interests are related to this work; Levi is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of NovaSight; Morris is on the scientific advisory boards of Neurotrack and of the AARP Global Council on Brain Health; Nahum is a paid consultant for Posit Science; Panizzutti is the founder of NeuroForma LTDA, a company with a financial interest in computerized cognitive training; Seitz is a founder and stakeholder in Carrot Neurotechnology, a company that sells a vision brain game called ULTIMEYES. The other authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Shawn Green, C., Bavelier, D., Kramer, A.F. et al. Improving Methodological Standards in Behavioral Interventions for Cognitive Enhancement. J Cogn Enhanc 3, 2–29 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41465-018-0115-y

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