Exercising Your Brain: A Review of Human Brain Plasticity and Training-Induced Learning

By C. Shawn Green, Daphne Bavelier. Psychology and Aging, 2008

688 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human beings have an amazing capacity to learn new skills and adapt to new environments. However, several obstacles remain to be overcome in designing paradigms to broadly improve quality of life. Arguably, the most notable impediment to this goal is that learning tends to be quite specific to the trained regimen and does not transfer to even qualitatively similar tasks. This severely limits the potential benefits of learning to daily life. This review discusses training regimens that lead to the acquisition of new knowledge and strategies that can be used flexibly across a range of tasks and contexts. Possible characteristics of training regimens are proposed that may be responsible for augmented learning, including the manner in which task difficulty is progressed, the motivational state of the learner, and the type of feedback the training provides. When maximally implemented in rehabilitative paradigms, these characteristics may greatly increase the efficacy of training.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa201a8a56e5efe9919c8cb39d130f4934d23a92

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Citations in the corpus

Mindfulness Revisited (2015, background): “…which they characterize as “learning effects that do not only improve performance on the trained task or tasks, but also transfer to new tasks and domains (Green & Bavelier, 2008), i.e., learning that is not specific to the trained stimuli or tasks” (Slagter, Davidson, & Lutz, 2011, p. 2).”
Are there bilingual advantages on nonlinguistic interference tasks? Implications for the plasticity of executive control processes (2011, background): “Similarly, elevated participation in mentally stimulating activities (Wilson, Bennett, Bienias, Mendes de Leon, Bienias, Morris, & Evans, 2005), social interaction (Bassuk, Glass, & Berkman, 1999), intellectually demanding employment (Potter, Helms, & Plassman, 2008), and video game play (e.g., Goph”
Training attentional control and working memory - Is younger, better? (2012, positive): “…Simons, Fabiani, & Gratton, 2008; Castel, Pratt, & Drummond, 2005; Chisholm, Hickey, Theeuwes, & Kingstone, 2010; Dye, Green, & Bavelier, 2009; Green & Bavelier, 2007, 2008; Mishra, Zinni, Bavelier, & Hillyard, 201; reviewed in Bavelier, Green, and Dye (2010)) have shown that regular action…”
Video Games and Spatial Cognition (2010, neutral): “As Green and Bavelier (2008) have noted, although more conventional training experiments that isolate and train individual cognitive functions may lead to faster learning, they may also result in less effective retention and less effective transfer to tasks that are dissimilar to the training task.”
Learning, attentional control and action video games (2012, neutral): “First, video games incorporate many characteristics of good pedagogy beyond those discussed above, including the ratio of massed versus distributed practice, personalized difficulty levels, just-right increment steps during learning, fun and engagement [8,82].”
Short-Term Music Training Enhances Verbal Intelligence and Executive Function (2011, methodology): “According to the work done by Green and Bavelier (2008), computerized training (like the training programs we used in this study) should improve executivefunction skills independently of training content (in the present case, music and visual art).”
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor: A Key Molecule for Memory in the Healthy and the Pathological Brain (2019, background): “, Marin, R., Dinelli, G., et al. (2011). Low serum truncated-BDNF isoform correlates with higher cognitive impairment in schizophrenia.”
Variability of practice as an interface between motor and cognitive development (2016, background): “Variability in task and context is deemed crucial in basic research on learning and brain plasticity (Green & Bavelier, 2008).”
Harnessing neuroplasticity for clinical applications (2011, neutral): “A key future direction for this field will be to maximize the extent to which cognitive training in one domain generalizes to others, and the extent to which such training has a meaningful impact on real-world functioning as well as the subjective experience of the individual (Green and Bavelier, 20”
Substitution of human olfaction by the trigeminal system (2025, unknown): “The brain’s plasticity with respect to training is well known ( 65 , 66 ) as is cross-modal plasticity in the cases of blind and deaf individuals ( 67 ).”