Cognitive training, also known as brain training, is a program of regular procedures that involves processes of the brain taking, organizing, storing, retrieving, and reasoning with data or information. Cognitive abilities are elements of fluid brilliance, such as administrative obligation and functional memory.
Cognitive training has relative relations with physical training. Both exercises are proposed to enhance greater strength, coordination, resilience, and pliability of the brain.
Near and far transfer effects are the resultant impacts on the brain with respect to its abilities to process information. In contrast, near transfer occurs when the training process enhances an individual learner’s performance in functions similar to trained examples. Far transfer occurs when an individual learner’s knowledge and skills transfer from the taught context to another varying context.
Skills Addressed in Cognitive Training.
Some of these training programs are narrower or wider exercised where the narrower ones focus on one or a few particular skills, while others are widely exercised. Narrow exercises articulate that working and perfecting one certain particular skill will yield higher production results.
In broader training, they work on the principle that the brain is a highly desegregated organ and that skills must be strong and work together effectively.
In Cognitive training, mental processes such as attention and memory are often considered. These cognitive skills have a number of different individual skills like attention skills which include sustained, flexible, sensitive, and divided attention.
Skills trained in Cognitive Training programs.
- Attention skills
- Visual processing
- Auditory processing
- Memory
- Sensory integration
- Higher Order Executive functions
- Executive functions
Procedure for Effective Cognitive Training
For efficient and conducive training, a couple of circumstances are considered. these are;
- How broad or narrow is the training program?
- How was the considered program developed?
- Does the program enhance working together of integrated skills?
- Is the program designed to motivate and engage the learner?
- Has the program been subjected to measurable results and reviewed published research and real-life studies?
- Can the program access your skills and demonstrate improvement in various areas of applied skills?
Near and Far Transfer in Cognitive Training
Since training schedules began, their programs evolve with respect to time passage. They are developed such that they hold the key that opens the drawbacks of learning afflicting one or more cohorts of developing learning skills.
The developers established problems and weaknesses in some underlying cognitive processes that obstruct learners from acquiring skills such as reading. The newly developed program improves these processes, eliminating the need for an informative focus on reading, and the learner progresses rapidly.
Through cognitive training, when a proposed program is well developed and established such that it underpins literacy, then strategies designed to grow that particular process must also produce a positive impact on literacy.
Evidence for Near and Far Transfer
A very good example of brain training programs is the recent interest in working memory training programs. It proves this theory such that learners with working solid memories are able to hold information while performing operations with the relative information, unlike those with less memory capacities. Learners with strong memory capacities are able to operate without their minds wondering and losing track of tasks involved in their operations.
Cognitive training empirical example is where the Olfactory Reading Program is designed to enhance and develop reading by enhancing the sense of smell. A number of skilled readers are usually Olfactorily superior, whereas struggling readers tend to be Olfactorily challenged.
Neuroscience has proven that many new olfactory bulb neurons are produced in a day in a rodent’s brain. Hence if struggling readers’ sense of smell was improved, then their reading will quickly be developed and progressed.