Sorry, I haven't been able to reply in the last few days. Frukc's article summarizes the study pretty well: it is a landmark study that really proves that fluid intelligence can be trained and is dose-dependent.
By the way, the Dual-N-Back exercise is available for download
here. The webpage currently features 4 different replication studies that have been done since the publication of the paper. It is replicable.
Back to the write-up. The blog article that Frukc linked had 5 points (see Frukc's answer) that directly follow the paper. However, I would caution that these points (seek novelty, self challenge, creative thinking, do things "the hard way", and "network") are highly informal and probably may never be directly testable through research. Also, some of the papers cited for plausibility are somewhat tenuous---at least to me.
What we know so far is that Gf (fluid intelligence) is an amalgamation of many different skills, with working memory as the nexus (or perhaps the essential "reservoir"). Such skills are controlled through "central circuitry" called the "executive function" (EF), whose definition is still not yet settled (though there are several models). To increase Gf, we will need to increase the efficiency and the capacity of the EF, for sure,
in addition to increasing the capacity and efficiency of the working memory. The problem is: How? That's especially true for the first part (EF training). Once we are exposed to brain-training exercises, we somehow develop some strategies against them and we execute them over and over again. As such, these exercises lose their novelty quickly---I think this is why previous papers show that there are no evidence in brain-training exercises improving Gf. This is why novelty requirement (and therefore self-challenge and do things the hard way) kicks in---it forces our brain to grow. The problem is how to define novelty: What is novel? Is synthesis over several different things enough to be considered as novel? I guess that the novelty context varies amongst individuals and the novelty that forces the brain to grow is what we are seeking.
On "Thinking Creatively": The cited Sternberg paper (
this one) is quite interesting. Especially the "What is teaching for successful intelligence" section. He outlines several key ideas:
1. Teaching for memory learning (Recall, recognize, match, verify, repeat)
2. Teaching for analytical learning (Analyze, evaluate, explain, compare/contrast, judge)
3. Teaching for creative learning (Create, invent, explore, imagine, suppose, synthesize)
4. Teaching for practical learning (Put into practice, use, implement, apply)
I can see that these teaching ideas would work (and he shows that they work by citing previous papers). The main idea is banking on the memory training and force the EF to organize around the memory reservoir. Since it somehow resonates with some EF model (esp. the Working Memory Model), such strategies would work. However, it is not sufficient to stop right there---especially more so since we have quite a number of EF models defined (
see wiki). For sure we would need emotional and social intelligence since EF also involves self-inhibition / regulation. On top of that, there are attention / focus, task switching, etc. However,
there's a paper that hinted that all these are manifestations of the same root ability, I am still a little skeptical about it (primarily about the analysis method---they used a version of factor analysis, which can be problematic to explain).
Anyway...
So, to conclude, I think the consensus on training Gf (and EF) is still not there yet. The five points are a good start.
Digg
