The first part of the exercise involves small squares on a screen that pop into a new location every three seconds. Volunteers have to press a button when the current location is a duplicate of two views earlier.
For the second part, the volunteers have to simultaneously carry out the same task with letters. Consonants are played through headphones and they have to press a button when they hear one that is the same as that heard two “plays” earlier.
If participants perform well, the interval to be tracked (n) increases to three or more stages earlier.
Jaeggi’s volunteers were trained daily for about 20 minutes for either 8, 12, 17 or 19 days (with weekends off). They were given IQ tests both before and after the training.
The researchers found that the IQ of trained individuals increased significantly more than controls – and that the more training people got, the higher the score.
And there are the usual caveats that come with such research. It should be easy to whip up a little javascript application that replicates the experiment.
