How to get better

What the training research says

The largest review of brain training, by Daniel Simons and six colleagues in 2016, examined the evidence cited by brain-training companies. Their conclusion is worth reading in full.

We find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.

Other large studies agree:

• Online brain training. Adrian Owen and colleagues ran a six-week online programme with 11,430 participants. People improved on every trained task, but "no evidence was found for transfer effects to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related".
• Working-memory training. A 2016 meta-analysis of 87 publications by Monica Melby-Lervåg, Thomas Redick and Charles Hulme concluded that such programmes "produce short-term, specific training effects that do not generalize".
• Inhibition training. Sören Enge and colleagues gave 122 young adults three weeks of adaptive go/no-go and stop-signal training. The trained group improved on the training tasks but did no better than an active control group afterwards, and showed no transfer to the Stroop task or to reasoning.
• Mindfulness. Amishi Jha and colleagues found that mindfulness training changed the orienting and alerting scores of the Attention Network Test, but "the groups did not differ in conflict monitoring performance".
• Action video games. A 2018 meta-analysis by Benoit Bediou and colleagues found a moderate advantage for habitual action gamers (g = 0.55) and a smaller effect in training studies (g = 0.34), strongest for top-down attention and spatial skills. But Walter Boot and colleagues found that 20 or more hours of action gaming did not substantially improve most cognitive tasks in non-gamers. The evidence is mixed.

So practising our games will make you better at our games and at close cousins of them. It will not, on the evidence, make you generally more focused at work.

Why practice still pays on assessments

That sounds discouraging until you notice what an assessment is: a short, unfamiliar task done once, under pressure. Familiarity with the task family is exactly what practice gives you.

John Hausknecht and colleagues pooled 107 samples covering 134,436 people. They estimated that a candidate at the 50th percentile on a first test could expect the 60th on a second and the 71st on a third. Interference effects shrink with practice too: over hundreds of trials, Davidson and colleagues observed "a practice-related reduction in the size of the color-word interference effect" in the Stroop task.

This is legitimate preparation. You are not learning answers; you are removing the novelty cost, learning what the task rewards, and building calm routines. The first five minutes of an unfamiliar flanker or go/no-go task are where most candidates lose points, and those are the minutes practice removes.

Protect the state you test in

Attention is unusually sensitive to your state on the day. Some factors have much stronger evidence than others.

Sleep has the strongest evidence. Julian Lim and David Dinges combined 70 studies of short-term sleep deprivation (24 to 48 hours). The biggest effects were on vigilance and simple attention, precisely the skills attention games lean on.

• Simple attention: lapses0.76
• Simple attention: reaction time0.73
• Working memory: accuracy0.56
• Complex attention: accuracy0.48
• Processing speed: reaction time0.3
• Reasoning: accuracy0.13

Notice the order: reasoning barely suffered, while attention collapsed. A candidate who sits up all night revising for a morning placement test protects the least sensitive skill and damages the most sensitive one.

Breaks beat willpower. In Norman Mackworth's original vigilance experiments, as a 2025 review by Raymond Klein and B. B. T. Feltmate summarises them, a salient interruption (a telephone call or a half-hour break) or performance feedback "could reduce or eliminate the decrement while urging the subject to be especially attentive had no effect". Between sections, actually rest your eyes; do not just tell yourself to concentrate harder.

Exercise helps a little. Yu-Kai Chang and colleagues' meta-analysis of 79 studies found that the effect of a single bout of exercise on cognitive performance is generally small (g ≈ 0.1). A short walk before a test will not hurt; do not expect it to transform your score.

Phones: cheap precaution, weak evidence. The "brain drain" finding that a nearby phone reduces cognitive capacity failed a pre-registered replication in 2022. Putting it in another room costs nothing and removes interruptions, which do carry a cost in stress and effort.

Your device. Hardware alone can add up to 100 ms to measured reaction times, according to David Woods and colleagues. Practise on the device you will test on, close other tabs and apps, and use a physical keyboard where the test allows it.

Techniques that work inside the task

1. Set your speed-accuracy point on purpose

   Every attention task rewards a particular balance. Our Arrows and Pulse score accuracy within a deadline; Singularity's game score weights accuracy three times as heavily as speed. Decide before you start: "right, and comfortably inside the time", not "as fast as possible".

2. Prepare before the stimulus, not after it

   Eyes on the fixation point, fingers resting on the response keys, the rule named in your head ("centre arrow only", "dot means press"). Most lost time in speeded tasks is spent getting ready after the item has already appeared.

3. Name the target, then search

   Whether it is an odd item in a grid or the relevant row in a data table, say what you are looking for before you look. Searching for a described target is faster than comparing items with each other.

4. Reset after an error

   A mistake in a speeded task tempts you either to rush (to make up time) or to freeze. Do neither. Use the next fixation point or the next question number as a reset, and take the next item at your normal pace.

5. Pace long sections with checkpoints

   In a 40-minute CAT section or a 20-minute bank-exam section, set two or three time checkpoints in advance. Sustained attention fades quietly; a checkpoint turns the fade into a decision.

6. Treat negative marking as a no-go decision

   When a wrong answer costs marks, an unworked guess is a false press. Answer when you have a reason; leave it when you do not.

Try the flanker drill below twice: once going as fast as you can, once answering calmly but promptly. Compare your errors.

Practice drillSign in to try it

A four-week plan

Short sessions work better than long ones for attention tasks, because fatigue changes the skill you are practising. Aim for four or five 20-minute sessions a week, and always leave your phone in another room.

1. Week 1: learn the tasks
   • Read the game lessons for Arrows, Pulse and Singularity before your first session of each
   • Each session: Arrows warm-up, then one of Pulse or Singularity, then Lengths
   • Adaptive practice on; do not chase levels yet
   • After each session, note your most common error type
2. Week 2: accuracy first
   • Aim for perfect blocks in Arrows and Pulse, since only a perfect block moves you up
   • Add Target Practice for selective attention on moving targets
   • Add Keypress twice this week for a second kind of stopping
   • Sleep at least seven hours before each session day
3. Week 3: pressure
   • Push into higher levels; expect to plateau and hold
   • On Singularity, use the name-the-standard and two-row sweep method every field
   • Add Timing Tasks once for perceptual precision
   • Do one session at the time of day your test is scheduled
4. Week 4: rehearse the real thing
   • Two full rehearsals: one 20-minute session with no breaks between games, as a game-based assessment would run
   • Before each game, spend 30 seconds reading and naming the rule
   • Taper in the last two days: one short session, then rest
   • Review your reports for trends across weeks, not single sessions

What to take from this lesson

• Practice reliably improves the trained task, sometimes close cousins, and rarely everyday attention.
• For assessments, that is enough: retest gains average about a quarter of a standard deviation, more with coaching.
• Sleep loss hits vigilance and simple attention hardest, far more than reasoning.
• Breaks reduce the vigilance decrement; urging yourself to concentrate does not.
• Decide your speed-accuracy point before you start, prepare before the stimulus, and reset after errors.

Next, the Checkpoint reviews the whole subject.

Sources

1. Simons, D. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., Gathercole, S. E., Chabris, C. F., Hambrick, D. Z., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. L. (2016). Do "brain-training" programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186. doi.org/10.1177/1529100616661983
2. Owen, A. M., et al. (2010). Putting brain training to the test. Nature, 465, 775–778. doi.org/10.1038/nature09042
3. Melby-Lervåg, M., Redick, T. S., & Hulme, C. (2016). Working memory training does not improve performance on measures of intelligence or other measures of "far transfer". Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 512–534. doi.org/10.1177/1745691616635612
4. Enge, S., Behnke, A., Fleischhauer, M., Küttler, L., Kliegel, M., & Strobel, A. (2014). No evidence for true training and transfer effects after inhibitory control training in young healthy adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 987–1001. doi.org/10.1037/a0036165
5. Jha, A. P., Krompinger, J., & Baime, M. J. (2007). Mindfulness training modifies subsystems of attention. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 7(2), 109–119. doi.org/10.3758/cabn.7.2.109
6. Bediou, B., Adams, D. M., Mayer, R. E., Tipton, E., Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2018). Meta-analysis of action video game impact on perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills. Psychological Bulletin, 144(1), 77–110. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000130
7. Boot, W. R., Kramer, A. F., Simons, D. J., Fabiani, M., & Gratton, G. (2008). Acta Psychologica, 129(3), 387–398. doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.09.005
8. Hausknecht, J. P., Halpert, J. A., Di Paolo, N. T., & Moriarty Gerrard, M. O. (2007). Retesting in selection: A meta-analysis of coaching and practice effects for tests of cognitive ability. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(2), 373–385. doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.2.373
9. Davidson, D. J., Zacks, R. T., & Williams, C. C. (2003). Stroop interference, practice, and aging. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 10(2), 85–98. doi.org/10.1076/anec.10.2.85.14463
10. Lim, J., & Dinges, D. F. (2010). A meta-analysis of the impact of short-term sleep deprivation on cognitive variables. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 375–389. doi.org/10.1037/a0018883
11. Klein, R. M., & Feltmate, B. B. T. (2025). The vigilance decrement: Its first 75 years. Frontiers in Cognition, 4, 1632885. doi.org/10.3389/fcogn.2025.1632885
12. Chang, Y. K., Labban, J. D., Gapin, J. I., & Etnier, J. L. (2012). The effects of acute exercise on cognitive performance: A meta-analysis. Brain Research, 1453, 87–101. doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2012.02.068
13. Ruiz Pardo, A. C., & Minda, J. P. (2022). Reexamining the "brain drain" effect: A replication of Ward et al. (2017). Acta Psychologica, 230, 103717. doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103717
14. Woods, D. L., Wyma, J. M., Yund, E. W., Herron, T. J., & Reed, B. (2015). Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 131. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00131