Last year started on a $2 million sour note for brain-training game company Lumosity. That's the amount the company, which advertised itself.

But a new, rigorous published this week in The Journal of found that such brain-training programs had no discernible effect on the brain, on cognitive performance, or anything else.The study was a between the laboratories of neuroscientists and, both at the University of Pennsylvania. Kable studies and Lerman is an expert in helping people. They wanted to see if brain-changing games could improve cognitive control and help people make better choices about risky behavior, and maybe even help battle addictions like smoking. Like most people, the scientists were also intrigued by the possibilities of changing the brain.

“If there are things you can do that would enhance your cognitive abilities, it’s an exciting idea,” says Kable. “We want to know whether it works or not.”Because of their focus on decision making, Kable and Lerman were interested in games that target, the umbrella term for capacities controlled by the prefrontal cortex that help us delay gratification, plan for the future, and do other cognitively difficult things. “It’s a set of brain regions that basically seem to be engaged whenever tasks are hard,” says Kable.

One of the important questions about brain training is whether improving at the skills needed to master a particular game has any effect on other cognitive skills. That is a principle called “transfer.” Proponents of cognitive video games believe in transfer. Kable and Lerman reasoned that if brain-changing games increased activity in executive function areas or made those networks more efficient, people might also show signs of making better choices.

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Their randomized controlled trial (the gold standard for research) included 128 young adults, which is quite a bit more than previous studies. Some participants trained with (with the company’s cooperation) for 10 weeks. A control group played a variety of similarly stimulating online video games that aren’t aimed at improving thinking and memory.

In addition to studying choice behavior, the researchers also looked for signs of basic improvement in cognitive performance. And for the first time in a study of brain-changing games, they included neural imaging to look at activity in relevant areas of the brains before and after training. Kable, however, is moving on.

“There are other ways of helping people make healthy choices,” he says. The hope with cognitive training was that you could improve people’s executive function so that can stay strong when they’re faced with temptation or hard choices. Now he’s exploring a different possibility: “Are there ways of having people set up their lives such that there isn’t a need to power through it? You arrange things so that your habits are pointed in the direction that you want to be in and you don’t have to fight temptation or make difficult decisions. That’s the long-term direction I’ve been thinking about.”.