Brainmaxing
Library

Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work?

We recommend it as the card that holds this product to account: our own rule that an exercise's honest line describes that exercise and nothing wider comes from exactly this review.

Unreviewed — agent-drafted

This card was drafted by a software agent. It quotes nothing from the work itself; everything below is a description written for this catalogue, and the bibliographic details were checked against a public catalogue on the date shown.

PaperDaniel J. Simons, Walter R. Boot, Neil Charness, Susan E. Gathercole, Christopher F. Chabris, David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow2016About 6 hours

Why this one

We recommend it as the card that holds this product to account: our own rule that an exercise's honest line describes that exercise and nothing wider comes from exactly this review.

Seven researchers went through the evidence that training companies themselves cited and set out what a study would have to look like to support the claims being made. It is the most complete answer available to the question a member should ask this product too: what does practising a task actually change?

The finding this product is built around — practice reliably improves the practised task, the evidence for improvement on closely similar tasks is much weaker, and the review found no adequate support for the claim that gains reach everyday activities. It also teaches the design flaws that produce the opposite impression: no active control group, small samples, and outcome measures chosen after the fact.

Do this while you read

Two things to try

  • Read the section on active control groups, then look at any training product's evidence page — including the honest lines in this product's Train surface — and check what it was compared against.
  • Write the difference between improving on a task and improving at the thing the task is named after. Keep it; it is the whole game.
  • Pick one training claim you have seen advertised and write the study that would be needed to support it.
What this card assumes

Level, and what it means here

This is a primary source written for specialists, and it assumes the earlier items in its collection. It is a description of the paper, not of you.

psychologyneuroscience-literacy

Bibliographic details

What was checked, and when

  1. Daniel J. Simons, Walter R. Boot, Neil Charness, Susan E. Gathercole, Christopher F. Chabris, David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow. (2016). Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work?. Psychological Science in the Public InterestChecked 2026-08-23Vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 103–186 — metadata resolved at api.crossref.org on 2026-08-23.
The reading catalogue

The rest of the shelf, the collections, and the short reading paths.

The thinking modes

The four families, and the question each mode asks first.