Transfer and "learning to learn"
Also known as far transfer, brain training, general thinking skills
Skills rarely carry across domains. What transfers is knowledge you already have, which is why there is no shortcut around learning things.
The claim That training a general cognitive capacity — memory, reasoning, 'learning how to learn' — improves performance on unrelated tasks.
Does not hold up The commercial version fails: an exhaustive 2016 review found gains on the trained task, little on near cousins, and essentially none on distant or everyday performance.
This is the most disappointing finding in learning research, and the one with the widest consequences. People get better at what they practise. They get somewhat better at things that closely resemble what they practise. They do not, in general, get better at things that merely feel like they use the same underlying ability.
Simons and colleagues reviewed the entire commercial brain-training literature in 2016 and found the pattern in its clearest form: extensive evidence of improvement on the trained tasks, less on closely related tasks, and little that training improved distantly related tasks or everyday cognitive performance. Working-memory training makes you better at working-memory tasks. It has not been shown to make you better at your job.
The same shape shows up in the deliberate-practice literature. Chess masters have extraordinary memory for chess positions and ordinary memory for everything else — including for chess pieces scattered at random, which is the experiment that settled it. Expertise is not a general capacity that happened to be trained on chess; it is an enormous store of chess-specific patterns.
The uncomfortable corollary, argued at length by Willingham, is that 'critical thinking' cannot be taught as a portable skill. Thinking well about history requires knowing a great deal of history. What looks like a general reasoning ability is usually domain knowledge doing the work, which is why the person who reasons superbly about their own field says obviously silly things about someone else's.
There is a narrower thing that does transfer, and it is why this section exists at all. Knowing how learning works — that retrieval beats rereading, that spacing is nearly free, that fluency is a liar — is knowledge about a process you will run in every domain for the rest of your life. That is not a trained cognitive capacity. It is a set of facts about a tool, and facts do transfer.
What to do differently
- Practise the thing you actually want to do. Proxies and games that resemble it are much weaker than the literature's marketing suggests.
- Invest in domain knowledge before general technique. Reasoning well in a field is mostly knowing the field.
- Do not buy brain-training subscriptions expecting real-world gains; the evidence for those specific claims is poor.
- Where you do want transfer, build it in deliberately: practise the same idea in several contexts rather than assuming it will generalise on its own.
- Treat study technique as the exception — that genuinely is portable, because it is knowledge about a process rather than a trained faculty.
Limits and trade-offs
- 'Debunked' applies to far transfer of trained cognitive capacities. Near transfer is real, and drawing the line between near and far is a live argument rather than a settled one.
- Taken too far, this becomes an argument against ever studying anything general, which is not what the evidence says.
- Most of the evidence concerns short training regimes. Whether years of a demanding discipline change something general is a much harder question and much less well tested.
- It is genuinely demotivating, and being demotivating is not the same as being wrong. There is no version of this finding that offers a shortcut.
What this means for a language
Two consequences worth naming. First, the popular claim that learning a second language improves general cognition should be held loosely — the executive-function and dementia-delay literature on bilingualism is contested and has its own replication problems, and it is not a reason to learn a language. Second, and more usefully: your third language really is easier than your second, but not because you have trained a general language faculty. It is because you now know what a case system is, you can hear sounds your first language does not use, and you know what a plateau feels like. That is knowledge and experience transferring, which is the kind of transfer that works.
The research
- Simons, Boot, Charness, Gathercole, Chabris, Hambrick & Stine-Morrow (2016), Psychological Science in the Public Interest
Comprehensive review of brain-training: improvement on trained tasks, less on closely related ones, little on distant or everyday cognitive performance.
- Macnamara, Hambrick & Oswald (2014), Psychological Science
Practice explains far less of expert performance than claimed, and what it does explain is domain-specific.
Related
Read next
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An exhaustive review of the commercial brain-training literature. People get better at the trained task, a little better at close cousins of it, and essentially no better at anything distant or everyday.
- Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works Book
Nine principles, each argued from the cognitive science rather than asserted. The chapter arguing that thinking well requires knowledge — not just skills — is the clearest statement of why 'learn how to think' cannot be taught in the abstract.
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Thirty-two primary papers summarised and then argued with. The best bridge if you want to move from popular books to reading the literature yourself, and it does not hide where the authors’ own position is contested.
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Popular-press, and it argues a thesis rather than surveying a field — but its chapters on interleaving, desirable difficulties and the limits of early specialisation are the most readable version of that literature anywhere.
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A short free report pairing cognitive-science questions with what the research answers and what it implies for teaching. The second edition adds memory, attention, motivation and misconceptions. Read this if you read nothing else.
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Aggressive self-directed projects — an MIT curriculum in a year, a language in three months — turned into nine principles. Strongest on directness and project design; weakest as evidence, since the case studies are selected on success.
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The correction to the practice-is-everything story. Deliberate practice explained 26% of performance variance in games, 21% in music, 18% in sports, 4% in education and under 1% in professions.