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TEAM Cognitive Training Thesis Proposal I pledge on my honor that I have not given or received any unauthorized assistance on this assignment/examination. Timothy Briner ______________________ Jacob Buchanan ______________________ Sydnee Chavis ______________________ Sy-Yu Chen ______________________ Gregory Iannuzzi ______________________ Vadim Kashtelyan ______________________ Mentor: Dr. Michael Dougherty Librarian: Glenn Moreton 1 Abstract Cognitive ability determines how well people function successfully in everyday activities. This is especially true in the area of education, where individual differences in cognitive ability have been shown to predict performance in a number of core competency areas, including reading comprehension (REF) and quantitative reasoning (Ashcraft & Krause, 2007). While cognitive ability has long been believed to be a stable individual difference variable – perhaps genetically determined (Friedman et al., 2006) – recent work in cognitive neuroscience suggests that cognitive ability can be improved through extensive training (Ball et al., 2002; Buschkuehl et al. (2008); Erickson et al., 2007; Merzenich et al., 1996). We seek to train and improve peoples' working memory capacity and thus also improve their overall cognitive ability. Based on prior studies, we believe that visuo-spatial working memory training will lead to improvement in other cognitive abilities. Introduction American students are chronically underperforming in mathematics in comparison to other developed nations. For example, in the recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, America's fourth grade students scored lower in mathematics than eight other countries, located in Asia or Europe, and eighth grade students scored lower than five countries, all located in Asia (Mullis et al., 2008). According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report (2005), American students lack a basic understanding of mathematics. This has been cited as contributing to a growing achievement gap as the students progress through the education 2 system (Mervis, 2007). In addition to international performance gaps, America faces its own internal performance gaps between certain demographics. The 2005 NAEP study demonstrated that 70% of African-American students and 60% of Hispanic students fell below the standard of basic understanding of high school mathematics, compared to 30% of whites and 27% of Asian-Americans who fell below this same standard. While these achievement gaps are well established, much less progress has been made in identifying their cause. One explanation for the achievement gaps is the presence of cognitive deficits which ultimately determine quantitative reasoning ability. A deficit in a mental construct vital to quantitative reasoning would be detrimental to math performance. One construct which has been demonstrated to be correlated with quantitative reasoning ability is working memory (Bull & Scerif, 2001). Working memory is the ability to maintain and manipulate information when completing a task (Colom, Rubio, Shih, & Santacreu, 2006; Engle, 2002; Unsworth & Engle, 2008). One hypothesis for the underperformance in mathematics and deficits in quantitative reasoning is a handicap on working memory. For example, math anxiety has been shown to negatively affect quantitative reasoning ability by functioning as a second task for working memory (Ashcraft & Krause, 2007). Math anxiety is a performancebased anxiety disorder, separate from general anxiety, seriously affecting at least 17% of the American population. It frequently causes a pattern of math avoidance, leading those affected to perform poorly on math assessments and avoid math-based classes and careers. Although only 17% of the population is considered "highly math anxious", even medium-math-anxious individuals show significant performance differences from low- 3 math-anxious individuals. Thus, there is a necessary demand for research regarding the improvement of math learning and performance (Ashcraft & Krause, 2007; Ashcraft et al., 2007). The impact of working memory drains, such as math anxiety, on quantitative reasoning ability may be greatly reduced if the capacity of working memory as a whole is increased. The purpose of our study is to show that because general cognitive ability and visuo-spatial working memory are predictive of quantitative reasoning and general cognitive ability and visuo-spatial working memory can be improved through extensive cognitive training, training on a visuo-spatial working memory task will lead to improvements in quantitative reasoning. Literature Review An individual draws upon their crystallized and general fluid intelligence when engaged in cognitively demanding tasks such as reading comprehension questions and math problems. These two components define a person's overall cognitive ability. Crystallized intelligence, the summation of an individual’s knowledge and experience, is applied to a problem via general fluid intelligence. General fluid intelligence is an individual's ability to identify relationships and draw correlations, and is comprised of short term memory and working memory (Engle, Laughlin, Tuholski, & Conway, 1999; Kane & Engle, 2003). Working memory is the individual's ability to maintain and manipulate information when completing a task. It is composed of a visuo-spatial sketchpad, a phonological loop, and a central executive (Swanson, Jerman, & Zheng, 2008). The visuo-spatial sketchpad is responsible for mental visualization and further 4 mental manipulation of images. Similarly, the phonological loop is responsible for mental manipulation of sounds. The central executive oversees the manipulations in the visuospatial and phonological constructs, and directs attention towards solving a goal task while ignoring competing tasks. The process of ignoring competing tasks is called response inhibition (Unsworth, Schrock, & Engle, 2004). The speed at which the central executive places information into working memory determines an individual's perceptual speed. The maximum capacity and speed at which each construct functions places an upper limit on the individual's ability to solve problems related to quantitative reasoning ability at a given time. Cognitive Ability is important for quantitative reasoning: Ashcraft and Krause (2007) demonstrated the importance of working memory in quantitative reasoning by studying working memory capacity and math performance in high-math-anxious individuals as compared to low-math-anxious individuals. The subjects were tested using two different verbal span assessments, and no significant differences in working memory capacity were found. Both groups of subjects (high-mathanxious and low-math-anxious) were given a dual-task setting: they were prompted to hold an escalating number of letters (2, 4, or 6) while performing subtraction problems, and then asked to recall the letters in serial order. When given this computational task, high-math-anxious individuals exhibited significantly lower working memory performance. This is due to the effects of math anxiety on working memory: the anxiety functions as an additional task for working memory which draws cognitive resources from the goal task, inhibiting performance. Thus, high-math-anxious individuals were 5 most severely affected by an increase in working memory load, demonstrating the critical importance of working memory to math performance. Working memory has also been shown to be strongly correlated with problem solving abilities (Swanson et al., 2008). Swanson et al. performed a study on 353 children (167 male, 186 female) from grades 1, 2, and 3 from a Southern California public and private school district. All children were tested for risk of serious math problem solving difficulties (SMD) in the first year of the study (Wave 1). Children at risk for SMD were defined as having a Raven Colored Progressive Matrices test score greater than 85, but with a mean math performance below the 25th percentile in normreferenced measures such as solving orally presented word problems and performing digit naming exercises. The Raven Colored Progressive Matrices task is a multiple choice measure of fluid intelligence, requiring participants to identify a missing segment to complete a sequence of colored matrices. The children were tested across three testing waves in a three year span in order to measure working memory capacity, general fluid intelligence, and risk for SMD. Children identified as at risk for SMD in Wave 1 showed a lower growth rate in work and lower levels of performance in measures of cognitive ability than those identified as not at risk. In addition, measures of fluid intelligence and two components of working memory (central executive, visuo-spatial sketchpad) in Wave 1 predicted Wave 3 problem solving accuracy. However, growth in problem solving accuracy was strongly correlated with growth in the central executive and phonological storage components of working memory. The strong correlation between working memory capacity and problem solving ability implies a relationship between working memory and quantitative reasoning. 6 High school students with high math ability were shown to have superior spatial abilities to average math students. In a study by O'Boyle et al. (2005), students who scored in the 99th percentile and students who scored in the 50th percentile on the Australian SAT were tested for spatial ability using a mental rotation task. Students in the 99th percentile scored significantly higher than students in the 50th percentile on this task. fMRI was used to monitor brain activity during this task. Students in the 99th percentile activated a unique brain network and showed activity in more regions of the brain when compared to students in the 50th percentile during the task. The study demonstrates the positive correlation between visuo-spatial working memory and quantitative reasoning. Cognitive ability can be trained: An individual’s capacity to form and develop new skills and habits is referred to as plasticity. Neural plasticity is the brain’s physical modification of neural circuits due to changes in neural activity. One significant form of changing neural activity is the acquisition of cognitive skills, defined as “abilities that an organism can improve through practice or observational learning and that involve judgments or processing… The capacity to acquire cognitive skills can be described as cognitive plasticity” (Mercado, 2008). Thus, by challenging an individual’s cognitive abilities through demanding tasks, the plastic nature of the brain allows an individual to improve cognitive abilities through the creation of new neural pathways (Mercado, 2008; Rosenzweig & Bennetta, 1996). Based on the plastic nature of the brain, stressors can be tailored to improve particular cognitive domains in the form of training. Dr. Michael Merzenich showed that training programs designed to restore children’s language learning impairments can 7 improve both their comprehensive skills and auditory perception. In 1998, Merzenich et al. demonstrated the ability to remedy the deficits inherent to language-learning impaired (LLI) children who have major temporal processing and fast-speech-element recognition deficits. LLI children trained 8-16 hours over a 20 day period with a computer program designed to improve their ability to recognize stimuli similar to what one must recognize in speech. After the training period, the LLI children demonstrated an increased ability to recognize speech and nonspeech sequences, substantially remediating the deficits in nearly all of the LLI children tested. This strongly indicates that training can overcome temporal processing deficits (Merzenich et al., 1996). Similarly, in elderly individuals experiencing cognitive decline, working memory training has been shown to improve memory performance (Buschkuehl et al., 2008). In this study, 80 year old adults received working memory training for three months. A second group received physical training for an identical training duration. At the end of the training, adults who completed the working memory training demonstrated increased memory performance over the active group. Also, the experimental group improved in tasks not directly trained, demonstrating transfer effects of working memory training. Buschkuehl confirmed the notion that transfer will occur if the training task and the transfer task utilize overlapping regions of the brain (Dahlin et al., 2008). The transfer benefits were limited in scope and were not observed to extend to tasks beyond the domain of the trained cognitive region, but the demonstrated improvements from were still present three months after post testing (Li, 2008). Although there was a decline from post-test to follow up scores, there was still substantial improvement in score and 8 processing time. With the proper maintenance, the cognitive training gains can be maintained and likely further improved upon following these studies. Since the brain is neurally plastic as well as cognitively plastic, training programs result in changes to the physical neural networks of the brain in addition to improving performance on trained tasks (Erickson et al., 2007). Erickson et al. studied how brain activity changes for people completing dual-switching tasks after training. They used a combination of two tasks: color discrimination, located in the upper half of the screen, and letter discrimination, located in the lower half of the screen. They kept the total number of visual stimuli on the screen equal for all trials. The trials and training was split into three different combinations of tasks. Single pure (SP) trials consisted of color combination and letter discrimination tasks given in separate blocks of time. Single-task single mixed (SM) trials consisted of a mix of color discrimination or letter discrimination tasks in the same blocks of time. Dual-task dual-mixed (DM) trials consisted of both color and letter discrimination tasks being given simultaneously. All of the participants were given an initial fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) test with SM and DM tasks, then the control group had a 2 or 3 week break before the final fMRI testing, whereas the training group had five 1-hour training sessions during the 2 or 3 weeks before being given the final fMRI test. The training group was split into three sections, each training either SP, SM, or DM tasks and all receiving continuous and immediate feedback. After the training, there was a greater change in response times for the training group than the control group. Performance accuracy reliably increased for the SM and DM training conditions but not for the SP condition. There was a larger reduction in brain activity in the focused regions for the training groups compared to the 9 control group. This suggests that improvements due to training are related to reduced activation in those brain regions. In addition, two areas of the brain did show increased activity with training that correlated with better performance. The DM condition improved the participants’ performance the most, supporting their hypothesis that training for more demanding tasks will improve performance more. Thus, cognitive training can improve the executive control process as well as the physical processes in the brain. Quantitative reasoning can be improved by cognitive training: In a recent study by Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig (2008), fluid intelligence was improved by training working memory. In the study, participants’ fluid intelligence was evaluated using the Raven Progressive Matrices task before and after training working memory. Working memory was trained with the n-back task. The nback test presents the participant with a visual cue and an audible letter. The participant is then prompted with one of the previously viewed visual cues and is asked to input the letter heard when that cue was seen. N is the numbered term in reverse sequence that the participant is asked to recall. Training with this task demonstrated improvements in fluid intelligence as measured by the Raven Progressive Matrices task (Jaeggi et al., 2008). These results demonstrate the existence of transfer effects (e.g. improvement in fluid intelligence) due to training on a working memory task. Considering the existence of transfer effects from training with a working memory task and the positive relationship between visuo-spatial working memory 10 capacity and quantitative reasoning ability, we hypothesize that quantitative reasoning can be improved through training using a visuo-spatial working memory task. Methodology In order to conduct our research, we plan to implement a quantitative psychological study. We will recruit participants within the student population and community at large in the College Park area. We will perform this study with as large and diverse a participant pool as is feasible. We do not intend to select a target demographic for two reasons. First, it is likely that most of the subjects will be college age and will form a specific demographic themselves. Second, cognitive ability is crucial for people of all ages; our data is more beneficial if they are widely applicable rather than applicable only to a specific population. If there are particular participants whose demographic does not match that of the group and their results skew the data, we will consider them as an outlier and not include their data in our results. Participants will be screened based on these criteria. Participants must be at least eighteen years of age for legal purposes. Participants must have normal to corrected vision in order to be able to efficiently complete the computer tasks. Participants must have unimpaired use of their dominant hand and must be native English speakers. Impaired use of the dominant hand or a lack of proficiency in English can lead to varying response time. We will attempt to keep the subject pool equal by gender and recruit from a mix of racial backgrounds. Participants can not currently be undergoing treatment or have a history of neurological, neuropsychiatric, or psychiatric disorders. These limitations are necessary in order to not compromise the validity and reliability of the 11 results. People with mental disorders have different cognitive functions and need to be excluded from the study in order to maintain control over the constructs dictating performance on cognitive tasks. Participants will be recruited with fliers placed throughout campus. The fliers will contain the following information: contact information, compensation for participation and a catch phrase describing the study. Participants will receive a base level of compensation upon completion of the study. Additional prize money will also be awarded to participants who show the greatest improvement in cognitive ability. See Appendix for detailed information about compensation. After the pre-test, participants will be randomly grouped into a control group and a test group. It is necessary to have a control group because without a control we would not be able to confirm that our training has any affect on cognitive abilities, and we do not want to subject participants to training with no substantial proof that it is beneficial. Having a control group in our experiment provides a gauge with which to measure our training, which will allow us to experimentally show what effect training has on participants. The experiment will be a single-blind study since participants will not know the group in which they are placed. Each participant will be assigned a unique ID number that will be used for that particular participant throughout the study. Each participant will be kept anonymous. We will maintain a log indicating each participants name and ID code. The master list of ID numbers will be stored in a locked room in the Decision, Attention, and Memory Lab at the University of Maryland. This log will be stored separately from the data, and will be destroyed at the conclusion of the study. Data will 12 be archived in the PI’s (Dr. Michael Dougherty’s) laboratory for a minimum of 10 years after publication, in accordance with the American Psychological Association, NSF guidelines. Before participants begin the study, participants will be told that they are participating in an experiment studying visuo-spatial working memory. Participants will be informed about the tasks they will complete and will be given a consent form to read and sign. Members of our research team will be available to answer any questions participants may have. Instructions for completing the tasks will be presented on the computer for each respective task. The study is composed of three essential stages: the pre-test, the training regimen, and the post-test. Each participant will complete a uniform pre-test to gauge the individual’s pre-training level of cognitive ability. The pre-test will measure the participants’ visuo-spatial working memory, verbal working memory, perceptual speed, response inhibition and general reading comprehension and math ability. After the participants have completed the pre-test, both groups will be asked to return to the lab in six weeks. The control group is currently not given anything, however they may be asked to complete another task during the training period to rule out possible placebo effects. The test group will be given a 2 GB flash drive containing the training regimen: the Adaptive Block Span Task. In the Adaptive Block Span Task (ABST), participants are required to remember the order in which a sequence of black blocks appear in a 4 x 4 grid. Each block will flash one at a time in one of the cells within the grid, and then the entire grid will flash 13 for one second to indicate the end of one sequence and the beginning of a new sequence. After one set of sequences, participants will be asked to recall the order of each sequence electronically using a mouse. The ABST increases or decreases in difficulty according to the participant’s performance. Participants are given a software copy of the ABST program in order to allow them to train on their own time for at least ten minutes a day for six weeks at home. The program itself will log the hours the participant ran the program, completed the training, the participants’ responses, and the participants’ response times. Participants will see screen such as: 14 Figure 1: Various screens observed by the participant when completing the ABST. Participants in the test group will be given instructions for using the ABST. They will need to connect the flash drive into their computer and access the program from a file on the flash drive. Accuracy will be displayed for the participant to assess performance and keep the participant motivated. These results will also be stored in a hidden, password protected file on the flash drive. Upon completion of the training 15 regimen, the participants will submit their flash drives to us so that we may compile all of their results. We are very confident the ABST will train visuo-spatial working memory and lead to improvements in quantitative reasoning. Similar validated tasks have been used extensively in other psychological studies. The Corsi Blocks Backward Task was used in a study to test and compare the visuo-spatial working memory capacity of both young and elderly adults (Kemps & Newson, 2006). The Corsi Blocks Backward Task is similar to the Adaptive Block Span Task, yet consists of only nine squares and requires the subject to recall the flashing blocks in reverse order. It also lacks any adaptive capability. We will facilitate pilot testing prior to our primary research to ensure that the ABST does in fact train visuo-spatial working memory. Six weeks after the pre-test, both the control group and the test group will return to the lab for the post-test. Each participant will perform the tasks by themselves on a computer. The length of the testing session will be approximately seventy minutes. The tasks chosen for pre and post-tests will be selected from the following: Testing Response Inhibition: Stroop: The names of colors will be flashed on a display in various colored text. The color word and color font in which the word is written can be either congruent or incongruent. The subject must input the color font by rapidly pressing the key corresponding to the correct color font. The subject must inhibit the response to read the word. Only primary colors will be used. Several keys will be labeled R, B, or Y (for red, 16 blue and yellow, respectively) for use by the dominant hand. Baseline trials will be conducted to determine the time it takes to identify the color. The baseline trials will have a number of characters corresponding to the number of letters in the word. X will be the only character used. For example, XXX is the baseline trial for red. The test will consist of 75% congruence, 12.5% incongruence and 12.5% baseline trials. This test will take approximately ten minutes. The screens the participants will see will look like the following: RED, the participant will need to press Y GREEN, the participant will need to press R RED, the participant will need to press R YELLOW, the participant will need to press B Anti-Saccade: The subject focuses on a cue in the center of the display. The subject must read a character, which is flashed quickly on either the leftmost or rightmost side of the display. This target cue is preceded by a distraction cue on the side of the display opposite the target. The target cue is quickly masked by the rapid succession of characters “H” and “8”. The subject must then identify the target cue by pressing the key corresponding to the correct character flashed. After subject inputs the target cue, the center cue is displayed to begin the next trial. Time between the center cue and distracting cue is constant. The time between distracting cue, target cue, and successive cues is constant. This test will take approximately ten minutes. 17 Testing Working Memory: Operation Span: The participant is presented with a mathematical equation. The participant is then required to confirm the validity of the solution. The participant selects “true” or “false” to confirm the equation. Immediately following their response, the subject is shown a letter. After several equations, the subject is prompted with a screen displaying “?” to input the sequence of letters that were displayed following each equation. For example, screen one will prompt: Is 4 x 3 / 2 – 5 = 1? True/False Participant will press T for true or F for false. The following screen will display the letter “N”. The next screen will display another equation, followed by another letter. After several equations and letters, a screen displaying "?" will appear, prompting participants to recall the letters in the sequence they appeared. This test will take approximately ten minutes. Reading Span: The subject reads a sentence and evaluates whether or not the sentence is grammatically correct. Subjects will identify the sentence as T for sentences that are correct and F for sentences that are incorrect. After the subject inputs their response, a word is displayed on the following screen. Several of these sequences are shown to the subject before they are prompted to orally recall all the words in the order in which they were displayed. The words are randomized nouns. This test will take approximately ten minutes. Participants will see screens such as: Evaluate the following sentence for grammatical correctness. 18 The dog ran down the street and jumped the fence. Correct/Incorrect? D The cat walk into the house quietly. Correct/Incorrect? K Testing Perceptual Speed: Canceling symbols: Subjects scan the page for a single target figure among other simple target figures. For instance, subjects can be asked to identify specific letters within a text. This test will take ninety seconds. For example, if participants were asked to locate the letter “s” within the first sentence of this paragraph, the response would be similar to this: Canceling symbols: Subjects scan the page for a single target figure among other simple target figures Summing to Ten: Participants are presented will a page filled with a sequence of digits from π and are given five minutes to circle all adjacent pairs that sum to ten. The number of correct pairs found is recorded and the average number of pairs found per minute is calculated. Two different sheets will be made from different selections of π digits. 50% of participants will use one sheet on the pre-test and 50% will use the other. On the posttest, participants will take the opposite sheet. This test will take approximately ninety seconds. Participants will be given papers that look like the following: 19 141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406 286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359 408128481117 Subjects will circle adjacent pairs as follows: 141592653589793238(46)2(64)338327950(28)84(19)7169399(37)5105(82)09749445923 0781(64)06(28)62089986(28)034(82)53421170679(82)148086513(28)2306(64)709384(4 6)09(55)05(82)2317253594081(28)481117 Letter Comparison: Two equal length strings of consonant letters run side by side for 200 pairs. The strings are 3-7 letters in length and are either identical or vary by one letter. The participant is asked to determine whether or not each string is identical for as many strings as can be evaluated in 90 seconds. This test will take approximately ninety seconds. Evaluating General Fluid Intelligence and general abilities: Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices is a measure of abstract reasoning ability independent of language or schooling. Participants are presented with figures and asked to identify the missing segment in order to complete a larger pattern. The missing piece is identified by determining the common theme between the existing figures. Matrices shown are frequently 2x2 or 3x3. This test will take fifteen minutes. 20 Air Force Officer’s Qualifying Test (AFOQT): The AFOQT will measure reading comprehension. Participants will read several passages and answer the corresponding questions. This test will take twenty five minutes. Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB): The ASVAB will be used as a measure of math ability. The math questions will range from algebra to trigonometry (similar to the SAT’s). This test will take twenty five minutes. Math Assessment: We will develop an assessment of math ability for use in both the pre and post-tests. The assessment will display several arithmetic computations which yield a single digit answer, 0-9. The test will use the four basic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The participant will input their answer and will immediately be taken to a screen displaying "Press any key when ready." Time and accuracy will be used to evaluate the subject's performance. Results will be interpreted with respect to difficulty, which will be tentatively determined by the number of manipulations (total manipulations per problem is 3-7), the types of manipulations, and the number of digits in each term. Guttmann scaling will be used to make final adjustments to problem difficulty after the tests have been administered. This test will take ten minutes. The post-test will be superficially different from the pre-test, but will be similar in both difficulty and in the constructs tested. For example, the post-test will have the same Operation Span Task as the pre-test, but the math problems and letters the participant works with will be different. Since the tasks are computer generated, it is possible for us to maintain the same difficulty level and also create new problems. 21 We will analyze pre and post-test data to determine the effects of training. Visuospatial working memory is a psychological construct measured by the ABST while the other constructs are not targeted by the ABST. This difference will allow us to assess to what extent the non-targeted constructs are affected by the visuo-spatial training (Friedman & Miyake, 2004). The levels of cognitive ability that will be measured by the pre and post-test scores are the dependent variables of our study. Our collected data will consist of the results from the pre and post-tests (scores and reaction times depending on the particular test) and scores and total time spent training for the ABST. We will analyze subjects’ pre and post-tests scores in order to determine the change in their cognitive ability. We hope to find that subjects who spent the longest time training on the ABST will have the highest improvement on their ABST scores and therefore will demonstrate an increase in cognitive ability on their post-test. Specifically, our analysis will identify Pearson R correlations between training time and changes in performance. By comparing these data and analyses, we can infer whether training in a specific area of cognitive ability positively correlates with other non-targeted cognitive abilities (Friedman & Miyake, 2004). By conducting a psychological experiment, we can determine whether it is possible to improve cognitive performance through training; the scores from pre-tests, training, and post-tests will allow us to determine correlations between training of visuospatial working memory and cognitive ability. The nature of the experiment itself will enable us to collect and evaluate data efficiently and comprehensively. The testing can be easily supervised, monitored and uniformly administered to all participants, which will 22 help to ensure that the tests and training are completed correctly. Since the ABST training will be completed by the subjects on their own time, it is convenient for them and there is no time demand on our research group. Also, existing pre and post-tests are published, standardized, reliable, and valid, while still flexible enough to tailor for testing in specific cognitive areas (Engle, Laughlin, Tuholski, & Conway, 1999). The tests that we will utilize are valid according to previous studies and research completed in the area of cognitive psychology; they are easy to obtain from psychological databases, as well as easy to administer to participants (Friedman & Miyake, 2004). The tests are accessible to us at no charge through the Decision, Attention, and Memory Lab at the University of Maryland. All of the members of the group have completed ethics training required by the National Institute of Health (NIH) in order to conduct research with human test subjects. Other than attaining Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval to perform the study, there are no other licenses or qualifications necessary. While there are several benefits of our research design, there are also a few drawbacks. Administering and proctoring the pre and post-test will be time consuming for all team members. Training with the ABST also requires a significant time commitment from participants, which may deter participants from completing the study. However, as the participants are encouraged to utilize the training program at their own discretion, this should not have a significant effect on our sample size. Participants must have access to a computer in order to complete the training. Most of the disadvantages we will face are inherent to the study of people and affect any psychological research design. Participants will inevitably have different levels of education. Some people are 23 simply better test takers than others. People learn in different ways, so not everyone will respond to the training in the same way. Finally, it will be very difficult to account for the confounding variables in the experiment, such as time of day of testing and training, the participants' daily activities, noise levels in the testing and training environment, and personal eating and sleeping habits (Royall et al., 2002). One of the greatest limitations our team faces is the ability to differentiate training gains from placebo effects. In order to limit placebo false gains on post-tests results, we will either assign the control group a "training task" which does not have any foreseeable benefits to cognitive ability or we will have a no-contact control and will not inform either the control or experimental groups that the ABST is a training task. Withholding that the ABST is a training task will confine placebo effects to participants who draw their own conclusions about the purpose of our task. Assigning a task to the control group will eliminate placebo effects but may have an unpredictable effect on our data. A demanding control task will better control placebo effects but will be more likely to have an unpredicted impact on the results. Based on previous research and existing literature, we expect to find that training one area of cognitive ability will improve performance in that specific area as well as other domain-free abilities (Engel et al., 1999). Most importantly, we anticipate that the training will improve subjects’ quantitative reasoning. This improvement will be validated by post-test scores that, statistically, are significantly higher than pre-test scores and by a steady increase in the subjects’ performance on the ABST. These results will be meaningful if they provide evidence that people can increase their cognitive ability, and 24 thus improve their performance on complex mental processes. Overall, the results we anticipate will provide insight regarding how to efficiently train the mind to significantly improve cognitive ability. Appendix This semester we are determining the pre and post-test regimen with which the subjects will be evaluated. As we establish our test regimen, we are compiling all of the necessary information about the tasks in order to apply for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. All but one of our tests has been developed and is readily accessible. We are currently in the process of developing our Mathematics Assessment Test. The test will be evaluated by our mentor and other professionals in the field. Our mentor has included the funds necessary for our research as a subsection in a grant that he recently applied for. We will also be applying for grants and are in the process of looking for the most efficient way to acquire 2 GB flash drives. The grant will provide us with the money necessary to compensate participants for their time. Once we receive IRB approval, we will begin pilot testing using the ABST. This pilot testing will allow us to evaluate how the ABST affects pilot participants’ visuospatial working memory and cognitive abilities. Evaluating the ABST with a pilot study will enable us to make any adjustments to the task to ensure it provides the best and most efficient visuo-spatial training to our participants. During the fall of 2009, we will recruit our participants and begin data collection; subjects will complete the training regimen in a six week period and we will use the pre 25 and post-tests to evaluate changes in the subjects' performance. In the spring of 2010, we intend to complete our data collection and analysis after which we will begin writing our thesis, continuing until fall of 2010. By the spring of 2011, we will edit our completed thesis: upon completion of the editing, we will submit the thesis for publication in a psychology journal. During this time, we will continue our literature review, expanding our knowledge of current research in cognitive psychology. Our expenses for the duration of our project will consist of funds necessary to provide monetary compensation to our participants and the cost of the flash drives needed to provide participants with the ABST. The cost of all of the tasks used in the pre and post-tests are free and the ABST is also free. Our study will contain a minimum of 50 participants and maximum of 100. Each participant will receive $20 ($10 for the pre-test and $10 for the post-test). The four subjects, both from the control group and from the test group, that show the greatest improvement from the pre-test to the post-test will receive rewards. The rewards shall be as follows: 1st place-$100, 2nd place $75, 3rd place $50 and 4th place $25. We will use the reward as an incentive for the subjects to complete the ABST for a longer period of time. 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