The meaning of social interaction in evaluations of cognitive training programs

Effects of social interaction during training intervention can lead to unspecific enhancements of performances. This may result in overestimating the effectiveness of a program. Those effects of social interaction are well-known, however, they tend to be neglected in actual program evaluations. Moreover, the effectiveness of a program can be overestimated because of coaching which is to be expected when the tasks of the criterion measures are very similar to the tasks in the program. Two studies are reported aiming at testing some hypotheses concerning the effects of social interaction and of coaching. Several programs to foster children's reasoning abilities and a memory training are evaluated with some tests of general intelligence, a test of visual perception, and a task developed to assess children's reasoning abilities (concept formation tasks). The data lends support to the expected effects of social interaction and coaching regarding the tests of general intelligence and the test of visual perception, although it cannot be said in general that those effects will show up inevitably. In contrast, the concept formation tasks show differential patterns of results under the various programs. Moreover, effects of social interaction should not be eliminated because they usually lead to (unspecific) enhancements of performances which might be an important prerequisite of successful trainings.