Session number: 34

Average n-back: 5.20

Duration (min.): 60 mins

I’ve been see-sawing backwards and forwards in increments of 10-20 all through the second training group, but my average n-back for today is 5.20. It’s not the first time I’ve reached it, but it’s nice to know that the first time wasn’t a one-off. Various days have been low-focus days, which has ended up back in high 4 averages several times.

I’ve been juggling n-back stuff with brain training at MyBrainTrainer, and with other software. Overall, I’ve been spending at least 2 hours a day on various forms of brain training. In non-n-back training exercises, my focus has been on processing speed, increased focus, and improving visual scanning (obviously to prepare for some of the upcoming more information processing tasks in the WAIS). I think they’ve dovetailed quite nicely.

I finally had a visual-spatial WAIS-III task administered to me 2 days ago (this testing seems to be going at a snail’s pace……). I was kind of looking forward to seeing how I fared in a measure of fluid intelligence, since most of the stuff administered so far has been of the crystallised variety. Either the n-back stuff helped quite a bit, or I’m very good at visual-spatial reasoning (or maybe a bit of either). The only thing that prevented me from a perfect score was anxiety – got nervous ‘butterfingers’ when handling the blocks and lost 1 bonus point on 2 of the questions, and on the final task I kind of panicked then got myself together and focused and finished perfectly – except that the time spent in sheer panic mode meant that I timed out and lost out on points for that question. Apart from that I scored perfectly with everything else. If only dual n-back could do something for the anxiety as well as working memory……..

I think the dual n-back made a difference in that up until the very last couple of questions I didn’t have to refer back to the puzzle as much whilst constructing, because I was able to hold more in my head at once whilst I worked. I think that translated into gaining valuable seconds in a timed task that would have otherwise been taken up moving my eyes backwards and forwards from pattern to construction.

I do think the neuropsychologist was a little bit surprised, as he has had me pegged as high on verbal IQ from day one and kind of naturally expected that visual-spatial would be weaker.

We also went through a visual-spatial memory task from the WMS, and it was way better than the verbal word-pairing I did a few weeks ago. Whilst my visual-spatial memory has always been better than random word groupings anyway, I do wonder whether seeing n-back patterns at n=6 in ever alternating shapes of 3 ‘nodes’ has contributed to that.

Coming up in the next 2 weeks:

That WAIS task that’s like digit span where you have to reorganise the letters and numbers in ascending order (or is it the other way around???). I have a baseline for that from my Simply Smarter software. A couple of weeks into n-back training, my baseline for this particular task was a span of 4. I’ve not taken another baseline since, but in practice exercises I am handling spans of 5, 6, and 7 digits/letters (although at a span of 7 I’m not getting it consistently every time).

Matrix reasoning. I’m curious about this one. I was mad about visual-spatial puzzles about 10 years ago and used to get nearly all of the ones in the Mensa puzzle books right, but immediately prior to n-back training I had slipped a bit (still getting the majority but fluffing a few).

Those ones where you’ve got to cancel out shapes and ones where (I think) you have to copy symbols – the more pure processing ones. It will be interesting to see the effect that a couple of more weeks of dual n-back practice will have on those exercises.

This post was submitted by Michelle.