Nintendo Brain Games Effectiveness Questioned 63
nandemoari writes "While Nintendo boasts that its Wii can make you fit, the game company's popular line of DS 'Brain Games' have for some time promised to make kids smarter by challenging them with word puzzles and math formulas. However, a French professor isn't buying the shtick. University of Rennes professor Alain Lieury, a cognitive psychology specialist in Brittany, France, recently studied a group of ten-year-old children playing a variety of mentally-challenging games. Not all were video games, however; Lieury pitted more traditional games (including sudoku, Scrabble, and regular old reading and homework) against Nintendo's popular line of DS hits, including Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, and Brain Training. Although he credits the Nintendo DS — one of the best selling consoles of all-time — as 'a technological jewel,' he finds Nintendo's claim that it can actually help kids learn is nothing more than pure 'charlatanism.'"
so "go bust" means... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:so "go bust" means... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:so "go bust" means... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes.
For example.
"I'ma bust two caps 'n your ass!"
means
"A professor of cognitive psychology is going to make this your unhappy day."
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is, and it's already in use: "badtitle" (among others)
However, the tags don't actually mean anything, wish we could mod the "editors" like everyone else. Give them an extra dollar per 10 mod+, we might see a lot more interesting articles, and better edited summaries.
Re:so "go bust" means... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, now put this against a neurologist (the titular Dr. Kawashima who apparently wrote a book about brain exercises and their effect) who measured the brain activity when playing the games...
Also it should be mentioned that these games are NOT sold as homework helpers, they're aimed at adults, probably to keep the fluid intelligence fluid for longer.
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If you want to take a "smartening pill" in the form of Nintendo DS, install DSLinux.
It is a learning experience for sure.
Wasn't there an identical study in Great Britain (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wasn't there an identical study in Great Britai (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wasn't there an identical study in Great Britai (Score:5, Funny)
Bust? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
So if it works, how is it 'bust'?
Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)
maybe the word "bust" went ....well...bust.
Re:Bust? Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, if that's all he studied, it wasn't properly controlled.
However, the summary doesn't mention that they divided the kids into 4 groups. Two with DS games, one with pencil-and-paper games, and one control. The DS games improved kids results by 19%, the pen-and-paper by 18%, vs control.
So they do work. The summary should have said, "Suduku is just as good as Brain Age" instead of saying "Brain games go Bust"...
Re:Bust? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
The article could be clearer in explaining the results.
Math test, degree of improvement over 7 weeks:
Presumably, the kids were all going to the same traditional math classes during this time period, and those classes caused most of the improvement. A better test would be to compare kids playing these games to kids on summer break.
Perhaps the DS games help give kids a desire to learn and an eagerness to take on mental challenges. That would be an immeasurable but invaluable benefit.
The oddest part about this article is the conclusion. After tearing down DS games, the researcher recommends that kids play sudoku, even though pencil and paper games did not produce any better results. This leads me to believe that the researcher had an initial bias against the DS.
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This leads me to believe that the researcher had an initial bias against the DS.
Yeah, and he's French, too - can't trust those cheese-eating surrender monkeys, nosiree! Ragging on good ol' American companies like Nintendo, that's what them always does...
Yee-haw!
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That and Brain Age has Sudoku as a game. So he is also not very observant.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
* DS games groups: 19% improvement
* Pencil and paper games group: 19% improvement
* Control group: 18% improvement
And what is the confidence interval here? Is that 1% improvement over the control group even statistically significant?
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As I understand the article, the control group went up by 18%, so only 1% difference for the games and the paper puzzles.
Maybe it's due to the Hawthorne effect? [wikipedia.org]
In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
...in other news, another french professor did a study comparing the effect of WiiFit in four group of teens.
Teens in 2 of the groups played WiiFit in their leasure time.
Teens in 1 of the groups participate regularly in regional sport competitions.
Teens in last group don't have peculiar physical exercices outside their regular activities.
(All teens go to a military boot camp as their everyday activity)~
Results show no noticeable improvement within the 2 Wiifit groups compared to the 2 others~
This come as a surprise after a study showing promising results among a population of modibidly obese couch potatoes~
--
More serioulsy : Yes, indeed. The other kids did classic games and all of them went to school. Brain Age isn't some miracle, so you won't see anything peculiar.
Still all of these (Decent school system, edutainment, and classic pencil-and-paper games) are all better than drooling the whole day in front of a TV set.
How much more stupid can this get... (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
If anything, this actually PROVES that Brain Age is just as good as traditional methods, if not BETTER, while at the same time being FUN for the kids because in their minds, they are at play, not at work.
Can you say "non-sequitur"? As children our brains are more agile because we get frequent practice in school, but as adults we don't. I even remember the friggin' game pointing that one out!
It definitely worked for me. As a kid I used to breeze through simple maths, but as an adult I started losing that touch, frequently needing calculators to do simple math. But when I started using Brain Age everyday, I've gone back to my maths skill level as a kid.
If there's anyone who's a charlatan, it's this guy, purposely withholding statistics that prove him wrong.
Re:How much more stupid can this get... (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw on a TV documentary that old and infrequently used knowledge can be refreshed easily. Often only an hour of doing something will bring it right back.
For the documentary, they monitored the brains of people that 1) Don't use computers and 2) use them regularly. They were tasked with searching the internet for stuff for 15 minutes. The first group was clueless for about 5 days - then their brains started getting really active. The others had active brains from the start.
Paired with other studies done, this seems to suggest that even if it doesn't help you learn, it certainly reinforces what you've already learned, and brings it back into active use.
I'm starting to picture the brain as a big HDD, and it takes about an hour to swap stuff from it into RAM. :P Then it sits there for a few days, until you need room for something else, and then gets swapped back to the HDD.
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Re:How much more stupid can this get... (Score:5, Informative)
That's EXACTLY what I'm complaining about. The author was purposely HIDING the statistics to make it appear bad. Read between the lines: 17 percent worse than what? Themselves BEFORE? Or worse than the pencil-and-paper group? If it's the latter, then that means they memorized 16% BETTER than before, which is STILL an improvement. If it's the former, it is highly improbable to happen and I'll have to question their method.
Speaking of questioning the method, I have a strong feeling that they actually used pencil-and-paper to test ALL of the kids before AND after! Believe me, the medium AFFECTS the memorization; many people use short-term visual memory to memorize words on these kinds of tests efficiently. If they asked the pencil-and-paper kids to do the test on a DS, I'll bet you two to one that they'll perform WORSE than the DS kids.
And I have a very GOOD reason to question the method:
Wow, suddenly BOTH groups are worse than the control group! Smell a conspiracy? I do too.
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Oooh. Good one. But not good enough.
Here's where I work: http://www.ai-center.com/games-lab/ [ai-center.com] We deal DIRECTLY with these kinds of stuff.
But, ah well, slashdot already did the payback for me. Cheers.
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It doesn't have to be a full-blown SAT to do the job for this particular experiment.
Brain Age uses 4-letter words exclusively for its word memorization game. If care was taken to ensure that the test given to the pencil-and-paper kids were similar (or, conversely, that the pencil-and-paper kids were given a different memory test at the end altogether than what they were used to for training), then it should be a fair metric.
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Also, is it 17% less of the 33% improvement of the other group (83% of 33)%, or (33-17)%?
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I can say "quack".
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I personally think that before you present a subject with a test you need to ask the following:
maybe not... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:maybe not... (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, given the previous study, it is quite over the top for the French scientist to call it charlatanism, since there are other studies that show it helps. It would be nicer and more accurate to say, "the issue is more nuanced than often implied."
Were you really expecting a Frenchman not to be arrogant?
I laugh at you and your innocent naivety.
French (Score:2)
And I fart in your general direction.
Wrong Wrong Wrongity Wrong says Dr Cox /Scrubs (Score:5, Informative)
So DUH, they don't work for children; that's not who they were designed for, nor marketed to! Fast reading of Tom Sawyer, or doing 100 Sudoku puzzles is hardly "kid" activity. This guy missed the purpose by a mile.
To verify, simply go to the Brain Age website [brainage.com] and read the blurbs, all aimed clearly at "aging" adults.
For instance there's this on page 1 front and center:
Exercise is the key to good health both for body and mind - and now, with the Brain Age games, there's a way to make mental exercise fun, even competitive. Just minutes a day, that's all it takes to challenge your mind and, with Nintendo DS portability, you can play Brain Age at work, on vacation, or anywhere your day takes you.
And this piece of market-speak Inspired by the work of prominent Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, the Brain Age games feature activities designed to help stimulate your brain and give it the workout it needs
Vacation, workplace, brain stimulation (like a 10 year old needs MORE stimulation?), yeah all typical concerns of 10 year olds. I mean really this guy jumped the on failboat: they advertise/review this at AARP.org (link at the site)
So it seems me Cognitive Psych guy missed a very big cognitive clue: they aren't marketing most of these for children, but to aging boomers! What a dimwit he appears to be.
Brain Age is not aimed at helping kids learn, its aimed more at adults to allegedly stimulate cognitive centers of the brina via calculations and puzzles -- that is supposed to help keep the brain "young". Some studies have shown that puzzle games of the sorts in these games help hold off aging effects on the brain.
How well it works is up for discussion, but saying it doesn't work for 10 year olds for whom it isn't designed nor marketed, well, lets say the study psychologist may want to use Brain Age himself to see if it helps his cognition of the obvious, which is evidently lacking.
kids mental years (Score:3, Funny)
Did the kids reduce their mental age as they kept playing?
Does the game end when you finally become your father?
Can you keep playing, going further back, generation after feneration until one day you reach the mental age of primordial ooze in it's adolescence?
By that time you should be solving the sudokus before the ds has had time to display them. And instead of simple drawinngs, they are n-dimensional matrices that replace numbers with string theories and emotional states.
Comment (Score:5, Interesting)
One comment already posted below the article is pretty good. I will shamelessly steal it:
"5. Karen | 01.27.09
Just read a SharpBrains blog post that may add some light:
http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2009/01/27/nintendo-brain-age-training-vs-crossword-puzzles/ [sharpbrains.com]
"As we have said before, Nintendo Brain Age and Brain Training should be seen as what they are: a game. And the construct of one's having a "brain age" makes no sense.
Having said that, the researcher quoted then offers, out of the blue, one of the less accurate statements of our times:
"The study tested Nintendo's claims on 67 ten-year-olds. "That's the age where you have the best chance of improvement," Professor Lieury said. "If it doesn't work on children, it won't work on adults."
That hypothesis (that something won't "work" on adults because it won't "work" on kids) has already been tested and falsified.
In a couple of recent trials, discussed here, the same strategy game (Rise of Nations, a complex challenge for executive functions), played for the same number of hours (23) showed quite impressive (untrained) cognitive benefits in people over 60 - and no benefits in people in their 20s.
How can this be? Well, we often say that our brains need novelty, variety and challenge - and it should be obvious that those ingredients depend on who we are/ what we do. A crossword may well be new and challenging for a kid, but not for an older adult who has done a million already. A videogame can provide good challenge to an older adult - and probably not to the kid who already spends 5 hours a day playing them."
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author needs to play (Score:2)
Since the Professor Lieury is, apparently, a complete lackwit, maybe he's the one who should play. Perhaps then he'll be able to understand that the games are marketed to adults, not children, and that his own results validate the functionality of the games (exercising the brain on "Brain Age" works just as well as exercising it with other tools).
To borrow a phrase "What a maroon!".
Put the the DS down... (Score:1)
Not meant to make kids smarter (Score:1)
Re:Not meant to make kids smarter (Score:4, Funny)
Another game about point of view (Score:1)
They work for me (Score:2)
Maybe they're not as educational as homework but so what? I love increasing my French vocabulary a little while I'm on a plane to Quebec. If I'm going to play a fun little diversion why not learn a little something in the mean time?
The real benefit is keeping yourself engaged. That's the benefit of Wii Fit as
it helps (Score:1)
Professor Layton and the Affair with Cooking Mama (Score:1)
2. Whenever a Scottish scientist holds a study proving something is true, there is more than likely some Scott-hating French scientist who holds an invalid test concluding that "Scotty is wrong". (Screw you, Frenchie!)
3. Television starts with the letter T [deviantart.com].