Newswise — Lumosity.com launches a new video game shown to improve intelligence. Lumosity.com, the leading online destination for games that improve brain performance, worked closely with the scientists at the University of Michigan who made the original discovery. Lumosity.com has developed an online version of the intelligence training program Dual N-Back. This new tool will be available to the more than 1.5 million registered members at Lumosity.com.
The Dual N-Back training program offered at Lumosity.com improves intelligence and memory capacity by challenging users to simultaneously remember items that they see and hear. Susanne Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, and John Jonides at the University of Michigan, and Walter Perrig at the University of Bern (Switzerland) recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that training on the Dual N-Back task resulted in gains in working memory and fluid intelligence that were significantly greater than those seen in the control group . Fluid intelligence, the ability to creatively solve novel problems, is a form of intelligence that had previously been thought to be fixed from a young age.
These findings shattered the long-held belief in the neuroscience community that intelligence cannot be improved. This research also showed that the more subjects trained, the more their fluid intelligence improved.
The team at Lumos Labs, makers of Lumosity.com, worked closely with the Drs. Buschkuehl and Jaeggi from the University of Michigan's Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab to create a version of Dual N-Back that replicated the training previously used in the lab while making it available online. The program will be used to facilitate further research in memory and intelligence training, with the Lumosity Research Platform supporting data collection and study administration.
"The online availability of the dual n-back task is a great step forward for our ongoing research and we are happy having found Lumos Labs as a competent partner," says Dr. Buschkuehl. “The online training variant will increase our throughput and speed up further research concerned with the dual n-back task as a training paradigm,” adds Dr. Jaeggi.
"This research is critically important to our understanding of how exercising the brain transfers to real-life improvements," said Michael Scanlon, Chief Science Officer at Lumos Labs. "We're excited to facilitate their research, and also to offer this powerful intelligence training on Lumosity.com."
The researchers are now recruiting healthy 18-35 year-old volunteers to participate in the ongoing study. Participants must be able to travel to Ann Arbor, Michigan for testing. Learn more: http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/smartbrain
The intelligence training program is freely available for a limited time at http://www.lumosity.com/training_applications/dual-n-back
About Lumos Labs, Inc. Lumos Labs is the cognitive neuroscience company behind Lumosity.com, the leader and #1 destination for healthy online gaming with over 1.5 million members. The programs are backed by studies showing that Lumosity training can enhance brain performance in areas such as memory, attention, fluid intelligence, and academic performance. The Lumosity Research Platform is used by universities around the world, including Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and Harvard to facilitate further research on cognitive training and the impact of Lumosity. The brain games are also broadly available to users on third-party platforms including the iPhone, Palm Pre, Yahoo! and Facebook. Top-tier venture capital firms FirstMark Capital and Norwest Venture Partners are the lead investors in the company. Since its formation in the spring of 2005, Lumos Labs has been consistently focused on creating innovative applications of the latest developments in brain science in order to help people lead better, healthier lives. For more information on Lumos Labs, visit www.lumosity.com.
About University of Michigan's Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab The Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab at the University of Michigan is headed by John Jonides, PhD and mainly concerned with research about attention and memory processes. A main focus of research is the development of cognitive training paradigms that not only promote improvements in the trained task but also in tasks that were not part of the training. Additionally, the lab is pursuing research with individuals diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, with the aim to better understand the dysfunctional processes in depressives, ultimately leading to more efficacious therapy for such individuals. Research in the lab is done behaviorally but also using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). For more information on the University of Michigan's Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab, visit www.jonideslab.com.
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