Bored on your daily commute to work? Forget Mozart. For just 20 minutes a day, you could train yourself to be smarter. Introducing the n-back task, a brain-training exercise touted to increase intelligence. At the 2011 annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Washington, University of Michigan psychologist John Jonides presented his findings: doing the n-back task for just 20 minutes a day, subjects showed significant improvement in fluid intelligence after just 20 days. Fluid intelligence, the ability to reason and solve new problems, is a key component of general intelligence.
The study was conducted in collaboration with colleagues at U-M, the University of Bern and the University of Taipei on more than 200 young adults and children. According to Jonides, the n-back task taps into the brain’s working memory- the ability to maintain information in an active, easily retrieved state, particularly under conditions of distraction or interference. Working memory goes beyond mere storage to include information processing.
So how does the n-back task work? The task is so called as it requires the test subject to remember if an auditory or visual cue had occurred n-times before. To begin with, the subject will be asked to remember a cue that had occurred 1 time back. Take for instance, an audio stimulus such as the following:
A G S TT U G C C E S The subject would be expected to respond (by pressing a button) when the letters in red are read out when n=1. If the subject scores well, n increases. The expected response when n=3 is as follows:
T G I F U IR L P R P M Q L F Q
With the red letters being the expected response cues and the bold letters being the 3rd- back cue. The task in question, the dual-n-back task, involves the simultaneous presentation of audio and visual stimuli.
While the n-back test had been introduced in a 2008 study by the same authors, the new study reveals it to be a “dose-response effect” relationship that lasts up to 3 months. Neural imaging also revealed that following training, blood flow increased in the regions used in the task even in nonuse.
The dual-n-task can be played online and on Java-enabled devices like the iPhone and Android, so get started today! The n-back task can be found here.
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