Many thanks to reader Sparky Parker for sending in this link! Soak Your Head offers a free version of the Dual N-Back task, and it’s a great place to start if you’re still on the fence as to whether Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro is right for you.
This nice thing about this site is that it provides a demo so you can see the training in action.
If you’re not familiar with dual n-back training, it targets your working memory by giving you a series of audio and visual sequences that you must remember. The level of difficulty increases or decreases based on your performance, and according to the Susanne M. Jaeggi study the training can increase fluid intelligence.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
About the author, Erin Matlock
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4 Comments On This Post
I’ve only used the online version, so I’m not sure what happened there. The great thing about freeware is that it’s free. The drawback is that there’s no support.
It seems you need to be using Windows, Visual Studio and Silverlight to view and work with the downloadable sourcecode, as well as the offline version. That’s way beyond my scope.
If you’re set on a downloadable freeware version, you might want to try Brain Workshop – http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/. I’ve not worked with it extensively, but I was able to download and install it pretty easily.
Good luck!
Hey listen,
I downloaded & installed this Dual N-Back Task–it did not work! All I got was a Read Me screen and a picture of a human brain. This freeware is a complete waste of time! Don’t bother.
What-the-f***?
Hey Justin,
Thanks for stopping by! I will try my best to point out the differences.
Mind Sparke is a desktop application so there’s no need to be connected to the internet to use it. You can either download your copy or have a physical CDrom sent to you.
Soak Your Head is a free online application, so if you have an internet
connection, you can access it from any computer. It is open source so if you
are the technical type you can download the files to your own computer and
customize them yourself. But, for those of us regular folks who don’t work with code, that’s not an option.
Mind Sparke tracks your progress and computes an average n-back score after
each training session, and then it tracks those averages across your complete
training block. I like this because it allows me to see my progress – I’m
motivated by the scores and they make me want to continue with the training.
Soak Your Head also gives you an average n Level score at the end of your
training session, however during my testing of it, I saw no way to create a
profile to track my progress over days or weeks.
The designs are different, but both follow the testing protocol of the Jaeggi study.
OK. Hopefully that helps! :-)
I’m curious as to how this online version of dual-n-back compares with Mind Sparkle? Are there pros and cons to both versions in your opinion (other than the obvious lack of a price tag for soakyourhead.com)?
Thanks!