Education Week - February 10, 2016 - 12

Annual Sales in Millions

Products That Claim
To Boost Brain Power
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created a tiered evidence structure
to help states and districts evaluate
programs' effectiveness in nascent
research areas like memory training, but actions against Lumosity
and Jungle Rangers give warning to
researchers and educators alike that
the promise of some interventions
can turn into hype.
"We are hoping to crack down on
overhyped claims in this area," said
Michelle Rusk, a lawyer in the FTC's
bureau of consumer protection. "We
may in the next year or two be bringing other cases for similar kinds of
brain training for children."

Booming Industry
Lumosity is one of the best-known
of a slew of new app- and computerbased programs intended to help
students improve working memory,
the system the brain uses to hold information during decisionmaking and
analysis.
Working-memory capacity naturally
expands as a child grows-12-yearolds can handle about twice as many
individual pieces of information as
7-year-olds, for example. In the early
2000s, neuroscientists and cognitive
psychologists studying neuroplasticity
found evidence to suggest workingmemory capacity could be expanded
in other ways, too.
"Originally, we were really excited about this; we found what we
thought was [learning] transfer to
other tasks," said Michael Dougherty,
a professor of psychology and the
director of the Decision, Attention,
and Memory Lab at the University
of Maryland, College Park. He was
one of the "optimists in the field," he

$226.9

Annual sales of brain-training
products in the United States and
Canada climbed past $67 million
last year, according to a recent
analysis by MarketsandMarkets, a
private business research group.
Worldwide sales of such products
were more than three times higher,
approaching $227 million.

$189.3
$161.3

said, but did not work on projects for
Lumos Labs or Focus Education.
"The claims of scientists and the
claims of companies-I don't think
they differ too much, unfortunately,"
Dougherty said. "I think these initial promising results were taken to
mean there were very strong cognitive results and changing [those
indicators] could change your life."
Since 2013, the business research
firm MarketsandMarkets estimates
the "brain training" market has
grown from $48.5 million in annual
revenues to more than $67 million in
North America alone, and it is projected to grow to nearly $200 million
by 2020. Worldwide, the market could
top $700 million, it says.
Lumos Labs declined to comment
for this story, but its advertisements
said outright: "Brain training has the
potential to change lives." Through
the Lumosity Education Access Program, Lumos Labs provided free copies of the games to students in more
than 500 schools, in part to help build
a research base to prove the interventions' effectiveness. The company
also built up a network of researchers, dubbed the Human Cognition
Project, to dig through the data, and
presented its research at conferences
such as the Society for Neuroscience.

Research Rules
In FTC documents, investigators
noted Lumosity offers 40 different
games that purported to target specific brain areas, using 10- to 15-minute sessions several days a week (at
costs ranging from $14.95 a month to
nearly $300 for a lifetime subscription). Advertisements pointed to studies that suggested the training could
improve students' math skills, includ-

$48.5
2013

$56.4
2014

$67.1

ing for girls with Turner syndrome,
a genetic disorder that can result in
cognitive impairments, particularly
in math. Advertisements also noted
a study of more than 1,200 students
in 40 schools. Those who used Lumosity to supplement their regular curriculum, the advertisement said, "improved more than a control group on
a battery of cognitive assessments."
That's true, as far as it goes. But
Lumosity's studies and many others
across the brain-training field had
increasing problems showing that
the improvements in scores on their
games actually transferred to better
learning, memory, and attention beyond them.
"Lumosity generated millions and
millions in sales and spent millions
and millions in marketing, so they
clearly had the money to do a couple of
high-quality studies," Rusk said. "The
best way to stay on the right side of
the law is to be very careful not to get
ahead of where the science is."
Eric B. Gordon, the president and
CEO of Atentiv, another cognitiveimprovement program, did not
comment on the FTC's settlements
but said his own company has been
building up evidence on Atentiv

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Worldwide

SOURCE: MarketsandMarkets

WHAT'S INSIDE:

MO

North America

2015

using clinical, home, and school
studies, and that any communications on its programs goes through
"independent scientific and regulatory approval" before being released.
"Only good practices deliver valuable and viable health-care solutions. Evidence comes first," he said.
But big, generalizable cognitive
improvements have been much
harder to come by than researchers
and educators initially hoped.
In a 2013 meta-analysis in the
journal Developmental Psychology, researchers at the University of
Oslo, Norway, looked at 23 studies on
working-memory training. They found
many programs did improve shortterm working-memory skills, but the
improvements were not sustained,
and the skills did not translate into
more general cognitive skills associated with working memory, such as
attention control, verbal and nonverbal ability, or word decoding.
In the same year, Thomas Redick
and colleagues at the Purdue University Applied Cognition Lab found
no evidence of improvement in general cognition after 20 sessions of a
working-memory training program
that used a structure that is similar to
many games: the "N-Back test." The
most basic form of the task requires a
student to remember a target, such as
a number or word, which appears in a
series, while dealing with distractions.

Finding Broader Learning

n

GROWING MARKET
FOR BRAIN TRAINING

Dougherty found similar problems
in his own experiments: Students
and adults regularly improved in
speed and accuracy on training
tasks like these, but the further the
task was from complex, real-life attention and decisionmaking, the less
those benefits transferred.
"It would be great if we could move
everybody's IQ by 2 or 3 points-it
would be amazing," Dougherty said,
"and I was very optimistic, and then
in study after study, both in my own
labs and other people's, we just didn't
find it."
In 2014, the Stanford University
Center on Longevity and Germany's
Max Planck Institute for Human Development convened international
cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists to hash out a consensus on
the state of evidence on brain training, which was blunt: "Claims pro-

moting brain games are frequently
exaggerated and at times misleading.
... To date, there is little evidence that
playing brain games improves underlying broad cognitive abilities, or that
it enables one to better navigate a
complex realm of everyday life."
An intervention that meets ESSA's
rules for research evidence on some
level could still include claims on promotional materials that run afoul of
the FTC's rules, which are based on
the federal Unfair Claims Act and are
more black-and-white than the new
education research requirements.
The agency can consider a claim misleading if it doesn't rely on "competent and reliable scientific evidence,"
based on "human clinical testing ...
randomized, double-blind, and adequately controlled; and conducted by
researchers qualified by training and
experience to conduct such testing."
That's roughly equivalent to ESSA's
top tier of evidence, but the education
law lays out lower tiers which states
can choose to use-particularly in
areas of nascent research.
Rusk of the FTC said the agency
would continue its investigations,
but warned school leaders to scrutinize any program claiming to
improve students' intelligence or
attention. "The more dramatic the
improvements promised, the more
skeptical they should be," she said.
"It is the case unfortunately that
we have to go after these companies
one at a time, and we don't have the
resources to investigate every product on the market, so it does require
some due diligence on the part of the
educator."
The scientists who developed the
Stanford-Planck consensus statement
recommended that future cognitive
research on brain training also examine "opportunity costs ... If an hour
spent doing solo software drills is an
hour not spent hiking, learning Italian, making a new recipe or playing
with your grandchildren, it may not
be worth it."
They and Dougherty also noted
that the one activity so far that has
been shown to have some improvement on general cognition is physical exercise-the opposite of sitting
in front of a computer screen or app.
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Education Week - February 10, 2016

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