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Brain-training apps are
popular. But can they help
you succeed in college?

Postmodern Studio/Alamy Stock Photo

processing speeds, better memory, and problem solving (Hardy
et al., 2015). That sounds promising, but a brain-training company
funded the study and also happened to employ the study’s authors.
However, another study found that training memory had benefits,
but mainly for subsequent tasks that were more similar to the training
(Gathercole et al., 2019). Now you aren’t sure what to think. To really
be convinced, you need to answer a key question: Does brain-training
improve college performance?

Where Do the Data come From?
According to a social butterfly friend of yours, he has 12
friends who are using brain-training and 13 who aren’t, and
you’re curious to know if you could actually see any differ-
ences between the two sets of people.
To see brain-training’s potential for improving college performance,
the exercises would need to improve outcomes on a task that col-
lege students typically have to do. College students’ most common
course-related task is still studying notes and taking a test on that
material. You ask your friend if his acquaintances are up for a little
challenge. You take a section of notes from your first-year history
course, and the 10-question multiple-choice weekly quiz that went
with it. You give your participants 15 minutes to study the notes, then
they take the quiz. You note their scores along with whether they had
been doing brain-training (see Figure 10.1).

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