A new study finds that 'an old dog can't learn new tricks' only applies to dogs. In people, older adolescents and adults not only learn certain thinking skills including non-verbal reasoning more effectively than younger people, they learn them better.

And providing a new boost for the marketing departments of 'brain training games', non-verbal reasoning skills can be readily trained and do not represent an innate, fixed ability.

The research involved 558 school pupils aged 11-18 and 105 adults, who were initially tested in various skills and then completed up to 20 days of online training in a particular skill before taking the tests again. They were then tested six months later to see whether the effect of training lasted.

The non-verbal reasoning test involved looking at a 3x3 grid of shapes with the final square left blank. Participants had to choose the correct shape to complete the pattern, and the shapes could vary by colour, size, shape and position. In another test, 'numerosity discrimination', participants were shown two groups of different coloured dots in quick succession and had to judge which group had the most dots.

At the testing stages, volunteers were tested on various tasks, not just the ones they had trained in, to see if the training effects transferred to other skills. No transfer effects were observed, suggesting that the effect of training was specific to each task.

"Some 'brain training' apps claim to improve your IQ by getting you to practise a specific task such as the non-verbal reasoning task we used in our experiment," says co-lead author Ms Delia Fuhrmann (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). "However, there is no evidence that this leads to an improvement in overall cognitive ability. All we can say for sure is that training to spot patterns in a 3x3 grid of abstract shapes improves your ability to spot patterns in a 3x3 grid of abstract shapes. While this ability is commonly tested in IQ tests, it might not be appropriate to make judgements about other forms of intelligence based on the outcomes of such tests."

Published in Psychological Science.