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Jonathan_Graehl comments on N-back news: Jaeggi 2011, or, is there a psychologist/statistician in the house? - Less Wrong
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Comments (22)
You are way too underconfident. If an intervention is equally likely to raise or lower the score with respect to the control group, without increasing variation, it does nothing.
When you say that the aggregate results "aren't impressive," you imply that they are positive, but if I read table 1 correctly, the aggregate results are often negative.
(by the way, the "active control" group practiced vocab and trivia, which should have no overlap to what's tested by SPM and TONI, which are completely nonverbal)
You're right. I didn't actually locate and compare the unsplit numbers from table 1; I just visually estimated (from the pretty bar chart, Fig 4) the average of the two n-back subgroups, since they're equal-sized. It looks like the n-backers (compared to the trivia/vocab studiers) a non-significantly superior improvement short term, and a non-significantly worse improvement long term.
I'm also puzzled as to why there's no passive control. Even though there's no obvious overlap in vocabulary/trivia learning and SPM/TONI, I'd expect some generalized training effect, at least in motivation/focus.
I guess my overall view of the evidence is: don't expect single n-back to do much better than any other form of same-effort mental exercise, for any purpose except the exact task trained.
There's no passive control because there are only 62 kids. Only spend as many kids as it takes to publish.
I would not expect a generalized training effect. Almost nothing exhibits cross-test training. People are excited about n-back because it is the only test that is said to.
If you believed single n-back was going to definitively beat the active control, then you wouldn't pay for a passive control. I buy that. But now that it hasn't, it's worth adding a passive control.
Some apparently randomly chosen training task (vocabulary and trivia memorization) exhibited just as much generalized training as single n-back. In your interpretation, neither had any generalized benefit, then - the improvement is just due to normal ~9yr old child development over the timespan.
I do recall hearing some credible evidence that dual n-back (whatever configuration was in some older Jaeggi study) gave a boost to "fluid intelligence". (thus the interest in the topic). But now I'm given to mistrust Jaeggi more than I would the average influential researcher.
That's unfair. Getting 62 kids for this study must have been difficult. You don't know what the costs would have been to get a few dozen more.
I said "spend kids," so the cost of acquiring them is irrelevant. I'm sure they're expensive, so I keep them fixed. If there were half as many studies each with twice as many subjects, they would be much more valuable. But they wouldn't be publishable, because they'd all have negative results.