A Window of Opportunity for Cognitive Training in Adolescence.
In the current study, we investigated windows for enhanced learning of cognitive skills during adolescence. Six hundred thirty-three participants (11-33 years old) were divided into four age groups, and each participant was randomly allocated to one of three training groups. Each training group completed up to 20 days of online training in numerosity discrimination (i.e., discriminating small from large numbers of objects), relational reasoning (i.e., detecting abstract relationships between groups of items), or face perception (i.e., identifying differences in faces). Training yielded some improvement in performance on the numerosity-discrimination task, but only in older adolescents or adults. In contrast, training in relational reasoning improved performance on that task in all age groups, but training benefits were greater for people in late adolescence and adulthood than for people earlier in adolescence. Training did not increase performance on the face-perception task for any age group. Our findings suggest that for certain cognitive skills, training during late adolescence and adulthood yields greater improvement than training earlier in adolescence, which highlights the relevance of this late developmental stage for education.
1 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Lisa J
LJ
Knoll
1 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Delia
D
Fuhrmann
1 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Ashok L
AL
Sakhardande
1 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Fabian
F
Stamp
2 Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London.
Maarten
M
Speekenbrink
1 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Sarah-Jayne
SJ
Blakemore
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D004493:Education; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
adolescence; cognitive development; cognitive training; education; learning; plasticity; sensitive periods