Exploring the effectiveness of commercial and custom-built games for cognitive training

•Participants were trained with a COTS brain training game or a custom n-back task.•Changes in general intelligence were compared to two control groups after 3 weeks.•No significant differences were found between groups.•Neither cognitive training system produced significant improvements.•Future work should consider longer evaluation periods for unsupervised training.

There is increasing interest in quantifying the effectiveness of computer games in non-entertainment domains. We have explored general intelligence improvements for participants using either a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) game, a custom do-it-yourself (DIY) training system for a working memory task or an online strategy game to a control group (without training). Forty university level participants were divided into four groups (COTS, DIY, Gaming, Control) and were evaluated three times (pre-intervention, post-intervention, 1-week follow-up) with three weeks of training. In general intelligence tests both cognitive training systems (COTS and DIY groups) failed to produce significant improvements in comparison to a control group or a gaming group. Also neither cognitive training system produced significant improvements over the intervention or follow-up periods.