Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Implementing interventions that are supposed to enhance students’general learning skill and overall cognitive ability is still acommon practice in education. The basic idea on which thisapproach relies is that improving domain-general skills providesbenefits for a broad range of domain-specific areas, such asacademic disciplines. Thus, it is assumed that there is far transfer –i.e., the generalization of a set of skills between domains looselyrelated to each other. In recent years, chess instruction, musicinstruction, and working memory training have been claimed to beable to train domain-general abilities (e.g., fluidreasoning/intelligence) which, in turn, generalize to other cognitiveand academic skills (e.g., mathematics). We tested these claims inthe population of healthy children via meta-analysis. The resultsshowed small to moderate overall far-transfer effects in all theoutcome measures of the three meta-analyses. However, the effectsizes were inversely related to the design quality (e.g., presence ofactive control groups), which casts doubts on the effectiveness ofthe three activities. We discuss the theoretical and practicalimplications of these findings for education and expertise andextend the debate to another type of training, video games training.