I remember Lumosity's video ads playing several months ago, and while I believe that playing brain games improves mental cognition in the same way as Brain Age does, I thought that good-old puzzle games like Portal 2 already do all that. And now we have proof that it does this better.
According to an interview on Popular Science, head researcher Valeria J. Shute has published a study in Computers & Education that shows the power of Portal 2 over Lumosity. The short TL;DR version? "Portal 2 kicks Lumosity's ass."
The long version? 77 undergraduate classmen randomly played either Portal 2 or the brain-training game Lumosity for eight hours, and then completed a series of online tests on problem solving. The results showed that the Portal 2 players scored higher than the Lumosity players in all areas tested. In fact, in the abstract of the study, the Lumosity players "did not show any pretest to postest differences on any measure." Yowch.
The study has a low number of participants and the long-term effects have not been studied, but at least in the short-term it seems that Portal 2 is just as good of boosting your brainpower. Of course there has to be more games than that.
Has there been any games you've played where you brain feels more powerful right after?
