Using games from the Brain Game Center for Mental Fitness and Well-Being, researchers tested whether people can improve their working memory skills.
Do you ever wonder why some people can easily calculate a tip in their head or remember an address someone told them a few minutes earlier to plug into their GPS?
The ability to remember small amounts of information over a brief period of time like this is known as working memory, and scientists are also trying to crack the code on how people can improve this type of function.
“It’s critical to have good working memory skills,” said Susanne Jaeggi, psychology professor and co-director of the Brain Game Center for Mental Fitness and Well-Being at Northeastern University. “If we struggle with working memory, all other cognitive domains suffer.”
But new research from Jaeggi is getting scientists a step closer to understanding how working memory can be improved. In a recent study, Jaeggi said researchers found that people can benefit from training their working memory skills and that machine learning algorithms can be used to predict a person’s working memory performance.
“This is kind of a test bed or a feasibility type of approach,” Jaeggi said. “If we know very early on in what tiers that people end up or how fast that they learn, we can then also personalize their (memory) training experience a little bit better to make it more suitable for their learning style, so to speak, in order to play to their strengths, but also to their challenges.”
Much like workouts can help train an athlete physically, these memory training exercises can help improve someone’s working memory function. Understanding where a person is at when doing these exercises can help improve the extent to which they can benefit from this training, Jaeggi explained.
In the study, 568 undergraduate students completed brain games. Based on their learning trajectories, Jaeggi and her team determined whether they were fast, intermediate or slower learners. The researchers then used machine-learning algorithms to create models to predict the students’ training patterns, using different relevant variables that were assessed before the training, like the student’s preexisting cognitive abilities, personality characteristics, motivational factors, video game experience, health status, bilingualism or socioeconomic status.
The study used games developed by The Brain Game Center. These memory games show users a set of stimuli they must recall in a specific order. The games often include a narrative to keep users engaged (they might be playing as an astronaut, for example, or exploring different worlds) and become harder as users go on to help them train their memory.
What researchers found was that the model was able to predict not only how much and how quickly the students learned, but that the student’s pre-existing working memory and openness to experience distinguished fast from slow learners. Slow learners who were more open to experience and had a background in video games were most likely to persist in learning.
“It’s usually not just one thing that’s contributing to learning,” Jaeggi said. “But the beauty about machine learning is that we can look at the collection of different variables and attributes — pre-existing cognitive skills, social demographic variables, personality factors — that contribute to the learning experience. The idea is that we can take these collections of pre-existing cognitive factors and select the ideal training environment to help people maximize and improve their skills.”
The research also illustrates that people with low working memory can improve their skills with the appropriate training. Jaeggi said this is helpful for older adults, people with neurodevelopmental or psychiatric disorders, or kids who all might experience challenges in this area.
“Working memory underlies the vast majority of our cognitive tasks that we do across a day,” Jaeggi said. “Therefore, we’re trying to come up with ways we can improve working memory with the long-term goal to help people function better in their everyday life.”