So having gone through all that intelligence stuff and hearing about this big news that apparently the dual n-back game increases fluid intelligence, I decided I might as well try out an n-back game myself. In an n-back game, you are presented with a sequence of objects (numbers, letters, sounds, etc) and you press something if the next object you are shown matches the one that was n objects ago. So, if you were doing a 1-back game you would just be pressing the button if the object you were shown matches the one immediately before it, and if you were doing, say, a 3-back game you would press the button if the object matches the one from 3 ago (like A, B, C, A, the last A matches the letter from 3 times back so you would press the button). Now it's a dual n-back game when you have to memorize 2 streams of objects at once (which I didn't know at first, so I just made a single n-back game). I made my rough calculator version in about 10 minutes with 5 speed options and your choice of n and how many digits to use. I played it a few times on low n levels, figured that was too easy and jumped to 7-back and struggled with that a little (if it was slow enough I could do it well but if it was very fast it got tough). Then it started to bug me about how much was lacking from this TI-83 game created in 10 minutes, and I looked for a better version online. I found
this, and I downloaded it, started it up, and went with the default settings. Here are the results from my first 20 tries:
The way it works is you advance a level if you score 80% or above and you drop a level if you score 50% or below three times without advancing. D is for dual and the number in the middle is the n-back level, so D3B is dual 3-back. I expect that this is pretty good for a first 20, which is why I had to be fair and mention the single n-back practice I had on my calculator. I didn't do all 20 at once, I did about 5 or 6 and then did other stuff and then did it again later. Also I cheated and quit in the middle a couple rounds when I missed a bunch at the start (osu! reflex), but it was after I had already done a few on D3B, and I only quit 2 or 3 times.
Then, I saw the FAQ and the discussions and the current research and all of that, all about the dual n-back game, and I realized that some people were taking this very seriously. There were studies that had been done recently, and people who put
a lot of time and effort into training on the dual n-back. For me though, I couldn't help but feel that... it was just another game.
