Key result
Cognitive, physical, and meditative interventions increased brain activity in distinct fronto-medial areas mediating training effects on cognitive, action, and attentional control.
Why the study?
Variable brain training approaches highlight the need to compare their efficacy and identify their neural correlates as potential neuromodulation targets.
What are the neural correlates and cognitive outcomes of cognitive, physical, and meditative training in healthy individuals?
Meta-Analysis
What are the neural correlates and cognitive outcomes of cognitive, physical, and meditative training in healthy individuals?
Cognitive, physical, and meditative trainings engage distinct fronto-medial brain areas, suggesting that combined interventions might jointly outperform individual effects.
Distinct fronto-medial targets by training type support neuromodulation trials; leaves open standardized protocols for cognitive gains.
While mounting evidence shows promising effects of brain training on cognitive functioning in healthy and pathological conditions, the spread of variable training approaches highlights the need to compare their efficacy and identify their neural correlates, representing possible targets for neuromodulation treatments. We performed coordinate-based functional magnetic resonance imaging meta-analyses to compare the neural correlates and the cognitive outcomes of cognitive (n = 22), physical (n = 22), and meditative (n = 20) training in healthy non-expert individuals. Pre/post-training cognitive metrics improved after cognitive and physical training, but their heterogeneity, or even the lack of these measurements in some studies, highlights the need of more structured protocols. Cognitive, physical, and meditative interventions increased brain activity in distinct fronto-medial areas likely mediating training effects on cognitive, action, and attentional control, respectively. The modular, training-specific, engagement of a region that is known to mediate feedback-based learning provides cues for boosting brain training via combined interventions that might jointly outperform their individual effects.
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Presti et al. (2023) conducted a meta-analysis in Healthy non-expert individuals. Cognitive, physical, and meditative training was evaluated on Neural correlates and cognitive outcomes. Cognitive, physical, and meditative interventions increased brain activity in distinct fronto-medial areas mediating training effects on cognitive, action, and attentional control.
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