The Training Improved the Scores, But There Was No Control Group

What the research found

A 2024 study in *BMC Psychology* asked a narrow, practical question. If a child with attention difficulties trains her working memory, does her attention improve? And do her emotional habits shift as well? Working memory is the mind’s short-term holding space, the thing you use to keep a phone number in your head while you look for a pen. Children with ADHD often have less of it to draw on.

The researchers worked with 120 children in Changchun, China. All were girls, aged eight to thirteen, all with a diagnosis of ADHD. Each completed 25 sessions of Cogmed, a commercial computer program that drills working memory through repeated, adaptive exercises, spread across five weeks. The children were tested before training, immediately after, and again two months later.

The attention results were clear. On a standard rating scale, attention-deficit scores fell from an average of 73 before training to 56 afterwards. The change was statistically significant (p=0.001), meaning it is very unlikely to be a fluke of chance. Lower scores mean fewer reported symptoms, so this is movement in the right direction, and a sizeable one.

The emotional findings are the more novel part. The researchers measured how these children tended to think about upsetting events. Catastrophizing, the habit of treating a setback as a disaster, dropped from an average of 9.2 to 6.1. Positive reappraisal, the healthier habit of reframing a bad event as something one can learn from, rose from 8.7 to 10.3. In plain terms, the children reported thinking about their troubles in more measured, less alarmed ways after the training.

The gains held. At the two-month follow-up the scores had not slipped back; the difference between the post-training and follow-up measurements was not statistically meaningful. Whatever changed appeared to stay changed over the short term the study could observe.

One point of honesty is essential here, and the authors are candid about it. There was no control group. Every child received the training, and no comparison group of similar children went without it. This is what researchers call a quasi-experimental design, and it is weaker than a randomised controlled trial. Without a comparison group, we cannot rule out that the children improved for other reasons: growing more comfortable with the tests, maturing over the weeks, or simply benefiting from adult attention and routine. The study shows that improvement happened alongside the training. It cannot prove the training caused it.

What it means for you and your child

Read carefully, this is an encouraging but modest result. It suggests that structured working-memory training may help some children with ADHD, and it raises a genuinely interesting possibility: that steadying a child’s attention might also steady how she handles frustration. That link between attention and emotion is worth taking seriously, because emotional volatility is often the part of ADHD that wears families down most.

But a single study of this kind cannot settle whether Cogmed works. The absence of a control group is not a minor technicality. It is the difference between “children improved” and “the training improved them.” Broader reviews of computerised working-memory training have repeatedly found that gains on the trained tasks are real, but that they often fail to carry over into lasting improvements in everyday attention and schoolwork. This study measured symptom ratings rather than classroom performance, so it sits inside that same open question rather than resolving it.

The sample also limits how far the findings travel. All 120 participants were girls, from two settings in one Chinese city. ADHD frequently presents differently in girls than in boys, and there is no guarantee the same pattern would appear in a boy, or in a child growing up in a different school system. The authors themselves flag the modest sample size and the short duration as reasons for caution.

So what should a thoughtful parent take from this? Treat working-memory training as a plausible tool to explore, not a proven cure. If you are drawn to it, watch for change in the things that actually matter to your child: whether homework goes more smoothly, whether mornings are calmer, whether she recovers from disappointment more quickly. Those real-world signals matter more than a better score on a training game.

It is also worth noticing what the emotional findings gently imply. Helping a child hold more in mind may give her a little more room to pause before she spirals. That is a reason to attend to the emotional side of attention difficulties directly, through the way you talk about setbacks at home, and not to assume that a computer programme will do that work on its own.

Our own view is unchanged by this study, but quietly supported by it. The most reliable gains come from steady, individualised support: an adult who understands how a particular child’s attention works, and who can build habits around it. A promising tool like this one may have a place inside that support. It is unlikely to replace it.