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A small study done by Marcus Perman and Dr. Artur Pocswardowski at St.
Lawrence University compared two protocols on the Peak Achievement Trainer® with
an untrained control group. This
study was designed to test whether they could enhance performance in female
undergraduates in just 8 sessions. The
primary measurement that was used was the Integrated Visual and Auditory
Continuous Performance Test (IVA).
A new protocol, which we have titled Neureka!, because it appears to
respond to new and important experiences, produced an improvement of 23.8 in the
standard score of the Full Scale Attention Quotient (FAQ) in just four 15-minute
sessions. That's 1.5 standard
deviations in an hour of training! By
the eighth session, this had dropped off to about one standard deviation (16.4
points) above the initial score.
I analyzed the results of the study in two different ways, analysis of
variance (ANOVA) and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA).
The study was also designed to explore whether using the subject’s mood
as a covariate would help us to understand the results.
Analysis of covariance is a statistical approach that looks at the
differences between the experimental groups and the subjects in the groups, and
allows you to predict how much of the outcome is due to these differences. It then removes this source of variability from the analysis
and tests the significance of the group differences—in this case, the analysis
of covariance I performed was testing for the differences between groups in the
gains in the FSAT and some of its subscales.
The covariate I used was the Anger scale on the Profile on Mood States (POMS),
a very well known and validated measure of mood (McNair, Lorr and Droppelman,
1971). The subjects in the control
group were significantly less angry at the beginning of the experiment, p <
.05.. It was also interesting to
observe that the Anger scale was not strongly related to any of the other five
scales on the POMS, which were all strongly related to each other.
The
Analysis of Covariance improved the significance of the results considerably.
While the analysis of variance showed the improvement from Test 1
(pre-test) to Test 2 (after Session 4) in the group trained with Neureka! to be
significant in comparison with controls, p < .05, analysis of covariance
showed this to be more significant, p < .01. .
By the third test at the end of the eight session study, this improvement
was still significant, p < .001 with the analysis of covariance but not the
ANOVA. In a small study (N = 5 per
group), this type of fluctuation from test to test is not unusual, and was not
significant here. The
Neureka! group’s overall gain in the FAQ, averaged over the two tests, was
significant at the p < .001 level with the covariance analysis, but was only
a trend with the ANOVA, p < .10. Obviously,
changes in mood do affect learning, and correcting for individual differences is
useful.
The combination of the Peak Achievement Training® Concentration protocol (InAll)
and the Microbreak tape also showed gains of 6.6 points in 8 sessions, p <
.01. Using the covariance analysis,
the overall gain was significant, p < .05.
However, the Neureka! protocol was significantly better than the
Concentration protocol combination, p = .05.
The
uncorrected ANOVA reveals that the
stronger learning effects in the Neureka! group were on auditory, rather than
visual attention.
The Auditory Attention Quotient
showed a significant overall gain, p < .05:while the Visual Attention
Quotient was not significant. However,
with the covariance analysis, both the Auditory Attention Quotient, p < .001,
and the Visual Attention Quotient, p < .05, were significantly improved by
the Neureka! training. The effects
on the Auditory Vigilance Scale were significant, p < .05, while those on the
Auditory Focus Scale were not.
Looking at the Concentration group with the Covariance analysis, there is
a significant overall improvement in the Auditory Attention Quotient, p <.
05, and a trend for the Visual Attention Quotient, p < .10.
If we can equate gains in the standardized scores in the Test of
Variables of Attention (TOVA) and IVA for the sake of comparing this gain to
Hershel Toomim's statistical average of 0.5 standardized score TOVA points per
session in prior EEG studies, we find that the gain in the Neureka! group is
considerably more. Based on the four 15-minute sessions, it is 5.95 points per
session, while the 8 session average gain is 2.05. The Concentration group also beat the average, with 0.82
points per session. These were
normal subjects, who may be expected to gain less than those who start off very
low and regress towards the mean. The
sessions were considerably shorter than the typical duration used in prior
research.
Did the experimental groups learn to hold the Concentration line down?
They were tested for the percentage of time they could focus
single-pointedly and hold it below 30 microvolts, using the InAll protocol.
The improvements for both groups from Pre-Test to Post-Test were trends,
p < .10. Here, once again, the
anger covariate improved both effects to significance at the p < .05 level.
It is interesting that the Neureka! group appears to have learned
Concentration as well as the
Concentration training group. However,
this conclusion may actually be limited by the fact that two of the five
students in the Concentration group started out above 90%. below threshold
Further statistical analysis in which the beginning percentages are made
approximately equal for each student may give us a better picture.
Neureka! is an improvement on a well-known but seldom-used training
strategy with many studies that support its effectiveness;.
The improvement may well have overcome the major problem with using this
approach.
The results with Neureka! are promising, but a larger study with
better matched groups needs to be done. Neureka! is an improvement on a
well-known but seldom-used training strategy with many studies that support its
effectiveness;The improvement may well have overcome the major problem
with
using this approach.
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