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Dr. Priti Shah, 4:00pm October 18th, 2016

Dr. Priti Shah

Psychology Department, University of Michigan

    Tuesday, October 18th
    Swift 107
    4:00pm
    Reception to Follow 

 Priti Shah
 How to play 20 questions with nature and lose: Reflections on 100 years of brain-training research

Despite dozens of empirical studies and a growing body of meta-analytic work, there is little consensus regarding the efficacy of cognitive training. In this review we examine why this substantial corpus has failed to answer the often-asked question, “does cognitive training work?” We first define cognitive training and discuss the general principles underlying training interventions. Next we review historical interventions and discuss how findings from this early work remain highly relevant for current cognitive training research. We highlight a variety of issues preventing real progress in understanding the underlying mechanisms of training, including the lack of a coherent theoretical framework to guide training research and methodological issues across studies and meta-analyses. Finally, suggestions for correcting these issues are offered in the hope that we might make greater progress in the next 100 years of cognitive training research.