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  3. Brain-training software may be a waste of time. People who played "mind-boosting" games made the same modest cognitive gains as

Brain-training software may be a waste of time. People who played "mind-boosting" games made the same modest cognitive gains as

admin2015-07-31  38
问题     Brain-training software may be a waste of time. People who played "mind-boosting" games made the same modest cognitive gains as those who spent a similar amount of time surfing the web. "It didn’t really make any difference what people did," says Adrian Owen of the Medical Research Council Cognition, who tested brain-training software on volunteers recruited through a BBC television program.
    Owen and his colleagues asked 11 000 volunteers to take tests to measure their reasoning ability and verbal and spatial(空间的)memory. Participants then spent six weeks playing on one of two computer programs, or just surfing the web for pleasure. In one program, which imitates commercial brain-training software, the volunteers solved simple mathematics problems and puzzles that tested their memories. The other was designed specifically to boost cognitive abilities such as reasoning and planning.
    After six weeks, the participants underwent a second round of cognitive tests. Both groups who played the games made modest improvements, yet so did the web surfers. Skills learned via the programs didn’t transfer to the cognitive tests, even when they relied on similar abilities, says Owen. For instance, people who played a game in which they had to find a match for a briefly overturned card struggled at a similar test that used stars "hidden" in boxes. "Even when the tests were conceptually quite similar we didn’t see any improvement," says Owen. He concludes that brain-training software only makes people better at the specific tasks they have been practicing.
    Yet Klingberg, who founded a cognitive-training firm called Cogmed, is indignant at the conclusion that all brain training is bunk. The participants in Owen’s study didn’t practise for long enough and there was no quality control over what practice people did, he says. "Asking subjects to sit at home and do tests online, perhaps with the TV on or other distractions around, is likely to result in noisy data," he says. "This paper does in no way disprove that the brain is plastic or that cognitive functions can be improved by training." Owen counters that his team’s research took place in settings similar to the ones people are likely to practice in. "This is what people are doing. They’re sitting at home on their computers doing brain training."  
From the second round of cognitive tests, Owen concludes that______.
选项 A、all participants have made much recognizable improvement dramatically
B、participants have developed reasoning ability to solve complicated problems
C、participants can make greater improvement in solving very similar problems
D、participants do a better job in specific tasks they have been practicing
答案D
解析 细节辨认题。由定位句可知，经过第二轮的实验，Owen发现即使这些测试在概念上很相似，但没有看到参与者有任何改善，而大脑训练软件仅仅使人们在一直练习的特定任务中得到提高，故正确答案为D)。
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