Weng-Tink Chooi, Lee A. Thompson
Intelligence, Volume 40, Issue 6, November–December 2012, Pages 531–542

Abstract

Jaeggi and her colleagues claimed that they were able to improve fluid intelligence by training working memory. Subjects who trained their working memory on a dual n-back task for a period of time showed significant improvements in working memory span tasks and fluid intelligence tests such as the Raven’s Progressive Matrices and the Bochumer Matrices Test after training compared to those without training. The current study aimed to replicate and extend the original study in a well-controlled experiment that could explain the cause or causes of such transfer if indeed the case. There were a total of 93 participants who completed the study, and they were assigned to one of three groups—passive control group, active control group and experimental group. Half of the participants were assigned to the 8-day condition and the other half to the 20-day condition. All participants completed a battery of tests at pre- and post-tests that consisted of short timed tests, a complex working memory span and a matrix reasoning task. Although participants’ performance on the training task improved, results from the current study did not suggest any significant improvement in the mental abilities tested, especially fluid intelligence and working memory capacity, after training for 8 days or 20 days. This does not support the notion that increasing one’s working memory capacity by training and practice could transfer to improvement on fluid intelligence as asserted by Jaeggi and her colleagues.

The difference between people who consistently grow and those who plateau rarely comes down to raw talent or starting conditions — it comes down to whether they treat their capabilities as fixed assets or as compounding capacities that respond directly to the quality of choices made around learning, relationships, and deliberate effort, a distinction that becomes much clearer when you read more about it here through the lens of artistic, mental, financial, character, and leadership potential as mutually reinforcing domains rather than separate inherited traits. What the framework gets right is the psychological architecture underneath all of it — the argument that seeing life as a set of potentials rather than a set of odds is not wishful thinking but a more accurate and actionable model of reality, one where the internal posture of "I can make it" is both neurologically supportable and the only honest starting point for anyone serious about closing the gap between where they are and what they are actually capable of becoming.

Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc.

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