my comment pulled from last time this was posted:

You can pull problems out of this study. Firstly, it's a crappy design, each group only played one of the games. Ideally everyone should have played both games and taken measures for improvements before and after both. We don't know if luminosity is crap or if that group were just less susceptible to training. Can also have been helped if the participants where matched so that both groups had an equal distribution of pre-test scores. Secondly, the statistics are woeful. Unless they've just neglected to put it in the paper, they've not corrected for multiple comparisons. Basically they should take the most significant finding and multiply it by 19 (and that's if we assume they were doing a one-tailed analysis, otherwise they made 38 comparisons).. That gives them p=0.79... Even if they have corrected 2 of the three factors that were significantly better in portal are a touch dumb. 1)Improvement in spatial skills - Luminosity does not train spatial skills... Portal is a spatial puzzle solving game... this is not surprising. 2) Persistence - expose people to a rewarding experience will make them persist at difficult tasks for longer than if they've just been bored out of their heads.... obviously this matters in terms of training packages, but is not exactly new knowledge. I'm also not chuffed with the pre/post test as it looks like they did those at home. I would worry about your points that students already play games etc. Firstly they actually controlled for that... Participants were excluded if they reported playing games regularly. In terms of time, the study took 10 hours over 2 weeks. That's not much time and they're being rewarded... (incidentally this is a shitty way of controlling a training day, at my lab you have to be in for consecutive days training) tl:dr. It's a poor study.