When Ilber Manavbasi practices a challenging piano riff, he doesn’t just focus on hitting the right notes. He pushes himself to rehearse under a variety of different conditions.
Manavbasi is a graduate student researcher in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“I practice in diverse conditions and contexts. I practice hungry, tired, angry, and happy. I practice different songs at different speeds and sometimes with different pianos,” said Manavbasi. "It’s the variety of practice that makes me a better performer.”
Variety improves learning
Manavbasi's approach reflects findings from recent research he and his colleagues conducted at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, suggesting that variety in practice might also improve learning , particularly in older adults.
The study, published in the journal Intelligence , demonstrated that engaging in diverse practice activities, rather than repetitive drills, helped older adults learn a new working memory task more effectively.
The research highlights the potential of varied cognitive training in maintaining mental sharpness as we age.
Varied practice and mental skills
“People often think that the best way to get better at something is to simply practice it over and over again, but robust skill learning is actually supported by variation in practice,” said lead investigator Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow, a researcher at the Beckman Institute.
“While the importance of diversity in practice has been well established in the area of motor learning, our study demonstrated that this principle applies to the development of mental skills as well.”
The concept of varied practice isn't new. In 1978, a study by Kerr and Booth showed that children who practiced tossing a beanbag from different distances were more accurate than those who practiced from a fixed distance.
A more diverse approach to learning
Similar patterns have been observed in athletics and academics - world-class athletes often have early exposure to multiple sports, and Nobel laureates frequently have experience outside their main field of study.
This led Stine-Morrow to wonder how varied practice might apply to cognitive training. Could a more diverse approach to learning improve mental performance, particularly in working memory ?
Focus of the study
The researchers focused on working memory, the ability to hold one piece of information in mind while engaging in another task.
“We chose working memory because it is a core ability needed to engage with reality and construct knowledge,” Stine-Morrow said. “It underpins language comprehension, reasoning, problem-solving, and many sorts of everyday cognition.”
Because working memory often declines with age, the researchers recruited 90 local participants between the ages of 60 and 87. They began the study by assessing each participant’s working memory through a reading span task, which tested their ability to remember information while reading unrelated sentences.
Variety of practice methods for learning
Participants were asked to read and comprehend sentences like, “Headwear worn by royalty is called a crown,” or “An animal with orange and black stripes is a zebra,” and then recall a series of letters presented alongside each sentence.
After this initial assessment, participants underwent four weeks of cognitive training. For the first two weeks, they trained using one of four different practice methods.
The various methods included practicing the reading span task itself, learning a new working memory activity, engaging in multiple working memory activities, or completing a control task unrelated to working memory.
During the last two weeks, all of the participants practiced a variation of the reading span task.
Training variety improves learning
The results were clear: those who engaged in a variety of practice, using multiple working memory activities, showed the most improvement on the final reading span test, outperforming participants who only practiced the same task throughout.
Interestingly, the mixed practice group didn’t start off as the top performers. “They needed to work for it,” Stine-Morrow said. “Mixed practice did not directly lead to better performance; it led to better learning. That group was the slowest to improve on the reading span task, but they ultimately reached the highest peak.”
One possible explanation for this is the principle of mutualism, where related abilities improve together. Varied practice may have triggered mutual growth among different cognitive skills , leading to more substantial improvements over time.
The effects of varied cognitive training
“With this study, we have demonstrated the broad principle of mutualism through the small lens of how it applies to working memory,” Stine-Morrow explained. “If you scale up this principle and combine it with different kinds of skills, that could demonstrate broader effects.”
The study was conducted remotely, with participants using home computers or iPads provided by the research team due to COVID-19 restrictions. Despite the challenges of fitting these activities into their daily lives, participants were eager to engage with the tasks.
“We are grateful to the folks in the Chambana community who support our research, especially in this case, where they had to fit these activities into their lives over the course of four weeks,” Stine-Morrow said. “Most people thought the activities were challenging, but fun, and treated them as a game they wanted to win.”
This study provides early evidence that varied cognitive training could be an effective tool for improving working memory and mental acuity in older adults, offering a hopeful strategy for maintaining cognitive health as we age.
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