Before the 8 weeks of game playing, we measured how well the children in the two training programs performed on tests of mental ability. After the 8 weeks of training, we tested both groups again, to see whether they had gotten better on these tests. The children who had played games like SET improved a lot on the reasoning test and showed improvements in spatial working memory and one of the speed measures. The children who had played games like Blink showed a different pattern: they got a lot faster on the speed measures but were not any better at reasoning. These results show that playing different kinds of games can sharpen different mental skills.
These are really exciting findings! However, our work is not done yet. For one thing, this study included only a small number of children. We would like to run this same experiment again with a larger group of children to make sure that we get the same findings. This is a process known as replication, and it is a really important part of scientific discovery.

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