Purdue Psychological Sciences researcher explains ‘brain training,’ multitasking and attention research for $4.5 million Office of Naval Research study

Tom Redick

Written by: Tim Brouk, tbrouk@purdue.edu

The scenario is familiar: You are at a party. The wine is delicious. The music is just right, and you meet someone. Soon after the handshake is complete, you can’t remember the person’s name even though you just learned it 15 seconds ago.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. There must be a way to get that brain of yours to perform better in such situations.

In Tom Redick’s lab, many methods are studied to improve brain cognition and memory — countless cognitive training apps such as Lumosity and Cogmed, puzzles of all kinds, health enhancements such as aerobic exercise, playing a musical instrument, meditation, and mindfulness. However, it is difficult to prove they better brain function.

“These sorts of activities that we can do or individuals choose to do and whether or not they work in the way they are claimed, how would we know if they work or not?” said Redick, a Purdue University professor of psychological sciences. “We are interested in truly knowing how or why or if they work. Like does a brain training app really do something that makes you smarter or your attention better? How do you actually study that? How do you measure that?”

Redick’s work recently caught the attention of the Office of Naval Research. He was pulled into a multi-university initiative that focuses on cognitive attention and decision making. The thrust of the project will be for recruits and officers in testing their abilities to make decisions and maintain attention during crucial situations. As co-principal investigator of the three-year project, “Understanding and Building Overall Cognitive Capability Through Attention Control,” Redick will test 150 adults ages 18-35 in various cognitive exercises over the course of 12 sessions. Overall, the multi-university research project is backed by $4.5 million from the Office of Naval Research.

Despite challenges of finding definitive methods of brain training, Redick’s work has revealed leads in ways that adults can keep that old noggin functioning at its best.

Could you give a brief description of your recent work when it comes to improving cognition, memory and “brain training?”

The brain training sort of falls within the larger sort of work that our lab and others have done looking at cognitive enhancement. … What are the sorts of ways that you can go about trying to do that and then the challenges associated with that? What does that mean for, say, a college student versus what that might mean for an older adult or somebody who already has some sort of condition like ADHD or dementia? What would the outcomes or the goals look like in those situations?

What are the biggest challenges with this work?

You ideally want to have large samples, and you really want to be able to test these over longer durations than typically what happens in a lot of these studies or to try to mimic something like the effect of exercising. How do you recreate that when you’re trying to study that in a single study or in a lab type of experience?

What are some details of the Office of Naval Research project?

We’re really focusing on improving attention control, how you can maintain your attention. How can you selectively attend to things and prevent distractions from interrupting you and preventing mind-wandering? It’s the idea of what one can do or how you can train or practice situations where you have to keep directing your attention or guiding your attention.

There are situations where things happen with some uncertainty, or you have to wait for some period of time. Certain individuals are better than others at being able to still maintain their attention. The moment that something happens, they need to respond. That’s something that clearly varies across people. It’s something that folks can practice on for those types of tasks and get better at in terms of in the laboratory.

In this new study, we use some eye-tracking measures. The ability to track where folks are attending while they’re being asked to attend to certain things can be used as sort of a proxy. You can combine that as opposed to relying only on their own reports of their attention. It just helps provide an additional source of evidence and perhaps one that in certain cases might be able to give you some indication of what’s really capturing their attention.

Why is this work so crucial for the Navy?

One of the things that the Office of Naval Research is really interested in is multitasking. We’re working with both the Navy and Marines, and they want to know how to measure multitasking. They’re interested in how this would apply in sort of the day-to-day situations that they face. Their personnel face a lot of different decision situations, whether we’re talking about war fighters or we’re talking about folks that are in a more sonar or radar capacity, things like that. And so, we’re measuring multitasking in different ways. Some of the measures we’ve created and are using consist of multiple things at a time that the participant has to (mentally) juggle, but none of them are necessarily more important than the other, versus a different task where there’s a primary task, but they get interruptions that they have to respond to.

While many methods of improving cognition and memory may not produce quantifiable data, there must be at least one that you would recommend or have the most trust in. Which is it?

The thing that has the most evidence that I would definitely suggest they do if they’re not doing already is to engage in some aerobic exercise with some frequency.

But no matter what, it’s about the initial paying of attention. When we have our phones in our hands and we’re distracted, we’re doing a million different things. If you don’t attend initially very well, it’s not very likely that you’re going to be able to really retain that information and recall it later on when you want to.