It's an attractive idea: by playing online problem-solving, matching and other games for a few minutes a day, people can improve such mental abilities as reasoning, language skills and memory. But whether these games deliver on those promises is up for debate.

Now, in perhaps the biggest real-world test of these programs, Stojanoski, a cognitive (认知的) neuroscientist at Western University in Ontario, and colleagues tested more than 1,000 people who regularly use brain trainers against around 7,500 people who don't do the mini brain workouts.

The researchers involved 8,563 volunteers globally. Participants filled out an online questionnaire about their training habits, opinions about training benefits and which, if any, program they used. Some 1,009 participants reported using brain training programs for about eight months, on average, though the time length ranged from two weeks to more than five years. Next, the volunteers completed 12 cognitive tests assessing memory, reasoning and language skills. They faced memory exercises, spatial reasoning tasks such as mentally rotating objects and pattern-finding puzzles, and strategy challenges.

When researchers looked at the results, they saw that brain trainers on average had no mental ascendancy over the other group in memory, language skills and reasoning. Even among those who had used training programs for at least 18 months, brain training didn't increase thinking abilities above the level of people who didn't use the programs.

"No matter how we sliced the data, we were unable to find any evidence that brain training was associated with cognitive abilities," says Stojanoski, "brain training may be beneficial in specific situations, but part of our goal was to look at brain training in the real world."

That real world may be the best brain trainer, says Elizabeth Stine, a cognitive aging scientist at the University of Illinois. While it's possible to improve mental abilities, she advocates practicing those skills in different real-life situations. "That's a much better use of one's time than sitting at a computer and doing little tasks."