Both Training Programmes Worked Equally Well

What the research found

A 2023 pilot trial set out to test whether a targeted brain-training programme could ease the symptoms of ADHD in children. The researchers, based in China, recruited 127 children aged six to twelve, all with a formal ADHD diagnosis. Most were boys, which reflects the pattern of diagnosis rather than any choice by the researchers. The children’s average age was around eight.

The design turned on a comparison. Each child was randomly assigned to one of two computer-based training programmes. The first, which the authors call ADHD executive function training, drilled the skills most often thought to be weak in ADHD: working memory (holding information in mind), inhibition (resisting an impulse), and sustained attention. The second, general executive function training, worked on a different set: processing speed, reasoning, and planning. Both were done at home on a computer or tablet, in sessions of twenty-five to forty minutes, with the difficulty adjusting to the child. The full course was forty-eight sessions across eight weeks.

Of the 127 children who began, 94 completed the training and the follow-up assessments. That is a dropout of roughly one in four, which is worth holding in mind: home-based training over eight weeks asks a great deal of a family. Fifty children finished the targeted programme and forty-four finished the general one.

The headline result is that both groups improved, and by similar amounts. On the standard ADHD rating scale, the targeted group’s symptom score fell by about 5.0 points, and the general group’s by about 6.2 points. Both changes were statistically significant within each group, meaning they are unlikely to be pure chance. But the difference between the two groups was not significant (p=0.45). In plain terms: the programme built specifically around ADHD did not outperform the more general one.

The same pattern held for the executive-function measures, tested with a standard computerised battery. Both groups got faster and more accurate on tasks of working memory, reaction time, and sustained attention. For example, stop-signal reaction time, a measure of how quickly a child can halt an action, improved in both groups. Again, neither programme beat the other; the effect sizes comparing the two ranged from roughly -0.40 to 0.23 and none reached significance. The one hint of a difference was in a subgroup analysis: children with milder baseline symptoms appeared to gain slightly more from the targeted programme, a small effect the authors flag as preliminary.

What this means for you and your child

The temptation is to read “both groups improved” as “the training works.” The authors are careful, and honest, about why that reading goes too far. This trial had no control group. No child was left untrained, and no child received a sham programme designed to look like training but do nothing. That absence is the single most important fact about the study.

Here is why it matters. Children’s ADHD symptoms can shift over eight weeks for reasons that have nothing to do with training. They mature. They settle into routines. Parents who have signed up for a study, and who fill in the rating scales themselves, may perceive improvement they hope to see. And simply doing a structured activity every day, with attention and encouragement, can help. Without a comparison group that received none of the training, there is no way to separate the effect of the programme from all of these other forces. The authors say this plainly: they cannot judge how much of the improvement was a placebo effect.

So what the study does establish is narrow but real. It shows that this kind of home-based cognitive training is feasible for many families, though a quarter did not finish. It shows that a programme built specifically around ADHD’s supposed weak spots is no more effective than a general one. That is a genuinely useful finding, because it undercuts the marketing logic behind many commercial brain-training products, which promise results precisely by claiming to target ADHD directly. Here, targeting made no measurable difference.

What the study does not establish is that cognitive training treats ADHD. This is a small pilot, and its own authors frame it that way. It cannot tell you the training caused the improvement, and it did not follow the children beyond the training period, so it says nothing about whether any gains last. This matters because the wider research on cognitive training has a consistent finding: children reliably get better at the trained tasks, but those gains often fail to transfer to everyday attention and behaviour, and tend to fade.

For a parent, the practical takeaway is one of calibration. If your child enjoys a well-designed training app and it fits your family’s routine, there is little harm in it. But treat it as a supplement, not a treatment. The interventions with the strongest evidence for ADHD, behavioural support, school accommodations, and where appropriate medication, are not replaced by any of this. Be wary of any product that markets itself as ADHD-specific and premium-priced on that basis. This study, on its own terms, suggests that specificity bought nothing.