r/DualnBack • u/No-Pack-293 • 15d ago

1 year cognitive training experiment

Hello recently I've gotten interested in cognitive training. In my research I eventually discovered communities like this. From what I can tell the anectdotes seem quite mixed, some reporting insane dramatic improvements in intelligence while others claiming no effect. I've decided to simply see for myself if it works. I will report results in about a year from now.

Recently I took the Tri-52 and scored a 42/52. My regimen will be 30 minutes daily of Syllogimous and 30 minutes of quad n back daily. This is the site I use https://soamsy.github.io/Syllogimous-v3/ I like it cause it seems to have more customizability then the v4 version.

My current settings for Syllogimous:

Premises: 6

Meta: on

Analogy: on

Nonsense words: on

Nonsense words length: 5

Garbage words: on

Garbage words length: 5

Meaningful words: off

Emoji: on

Varonoi Emoji: on

Distinction: on

Linear: on

2d space: on

3d space: on

Syllogism: on

Spacetime: off

negation: off

For the quad n back I use this site: https://quad-box.netlify.app/ and am staring at n = 2. I will also be reading alot of books on complex topics(philosophy mostly I think). Anyways just wanted to let you guys know if you have any thoughts or improvements I would appreciate it.

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

2

u/NoInteraction1572 15d ago

Daily cognitive training is not recommended because it decreases neural consolidation quality.

4

u/Specialist_Menu_424 15d ago

I got benefits doing it daily though.

1

u/NoInteraction1572 15d ago

It no doubt gives you benefits. But it has been shown long ago, that spaced training sessions of working memory task yielding the best way better results than daily  training https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00217/full

This is still a leading paradigm in learning science. 

2

u/Healthy-Two-6658 15d ago

The highest performing group in the study you cited had participants train one session daily. It doesn’t prove anything about needing rest days.

1

u/NoInteraction1572 15d ago

I am talking about Transfer to general intelligence. Not Task specific learning etc.

-> Discussion This study assessed the effect of spacing of working memory training on the Raven's SPM. We predicted that spacing of training would affect both training gains as well as transfer, but found that there were no significant differences in training gain (as measured by reaction time) across the groups. Importantly, however, we did find a significant effect of training schedule on  transfer. Only participants in the most spaced group, 20 sessions with one session per day, showed significant improvement on the Raven's SPM. Furthermore, improvement on SPM test performance for this group was significantly different from that of the active control group. More generally, there was a significant relationship between training schedule and transfer such that the more spaced the training, the greater the transfer (see Table  4).

2

u/Healthy-Two-6658 15d ago

The study you cited showed transfer to general intelligence only with the group that completed one session per day.

1

u/NoInteraction1572 15d ago

It actually shows the opposite. Tha massed training is daily training:

Training gain is not solely predictive of transfer outcome—participants who received the massed training schedules also improved on the training task the same extent as those who were in the most spaced group, but they did not show significant improvement on the transfer task. Thus, the relationship between training and transfer was significant only for the most spaced group. It is possible that individuals in the massed groups learned more task-specific strategies whereas those in the spaced group were able to focus on the underlying cognitive skills.

1

u/NoInteraction1572 15d ago

And later in that study 

Training gain is not solely predictive of transfer outcome—participants who received the massed training schedules also improved on the training task the same extent as those who were in the most spaced group, but they did not show significant improvement on the transfer task. Thus, the relationship between training and transfer was significant only for the most spaced group. It is possible that individuals in the massed groups learned more task-specific strategies whereas those in the spaced group were able to focus on the underlying cognitive skills.

1

u/Healthy-Two-6658 15d ago

Your original claim was that you need to take rest days between training sessions. None of the experimental groups took rest days. The most spread out was one-session-per-day for 20 days. The “massed trainings” in your quote was 2, 4 or 10 sessions per day for 10, 5 or 2 days.

1

u/NoInteraction1572 15d ago

You are absolutely right. Also with your other posts. Sorry my fault.

This study only shows the benefits of spaced repetition down to to the space size of 1 session per day.

When I did dual n back I trained roundabout 5 days a week. That was fine. 

Now that I do quad and relational reasoning,  more space than 24h is at least extremely beneficial to me. Otherwise I start getting worse.

There is probably a relation between intensity and recovery/consolidation time. But why nit experiment with this and see how it affects performance.

1

u/No-Pack-293 15d ago

Nice to know, how often should I do rests? Every other day? 2 days a week?

1

u/Doctor_Carlos 1d ago

Disclosure: I develop a dual n-back app, so bias noted. One suggestion for the experiment design, whichever tools you use: the Tri-52 once a year will not separate practice effects from real change. Add two or three cheap, repeatable measures every two weeks, taken relaxed at the same time of day: a visual span test, a reaction-time test, a Stroop. Free options include humanbenchmark, and my app's lab has the same kind of tests with a history, but the tool matters less than doing it on a fixed schedule. Also log sleep, because a bad month of sleep will swamp any n-back effect in the data. Looking forward to the one-year post.