Constant comments on Experiment Idea Thread - Spring 2011 - Less Wrong
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Comments (53)
A few of us at Singularity Institute tested Dual N-Back last year. For 1 week, 13 people were tested on dissimilar metrics of intelligence while some of them performed the same kind of Dual N-Back done in the original Jaeggi study.
Conclusion: It doesn't make you smarter.
Bonus: You get better at Dual N-Back though!
Interestingly, at around the same time as we were doing our tests last last year, the original research "replicated" her own results and published them again using new data. I'm sort of confused. I don't want to say Jaeggi doesn't understand training and practice effects... but I'm struggling to understand how else to explain this.
That said, it would still be cool to see LW folks test IA interventions. I just recommend exploring more promising ones. Perhaps seeking to confirm the results of these studies instead?
One week seems very short compared to the studies. I didn't check all, but one mentioned in Wikipedia was 5 weeks and another whose abstract I found was 4 weeks. It seems probable that any effects on the brain would be slow to accumulate. As a point of comparison, it takes a lot longer than one week to assess the value of a particular muscle training program.