Abstract
Making new breakthroughs in understanding the processes underlying human cognition may depend on the availability of very large datasets that have not historically existed in psychology and neuroscience. Lumosity is a web-based cognitive training platform that has grown to include over 600 million cognitive training task results from over 35 million individuals, comprising the largest existing dataset of human cognitive performance. As part of the Human Cognition Project, Lumosity's collaborative research program to understand the human mind, Lumos Labs researchers and external research collaborators have begun to explore this dataset in order uncover novel insights about the correlates of cognitive performance. This paper presents two preliminary demonstrations of some of the kinds of questions that can be examined with the dataset. The first example focuses on replicating known findings relating lifestyle factors to baseline cognitive performance in a demographically diverse, healthy population at a much larger scale than has previously been available. The second example examines a question that would likely be very difficult to study in laboratory-based and existing online experimental research approaches at a large scale: specifically, how learning ability for different types of cognitive tasks changes with age. We hope that these examples will provoke the imagination of researchers who are interested in collaborating to answer fundamental questions about human cognitive performance.
Highlights
While many scientific fields ranging from biology to the social sciences are being revolutionized by the availability of large datasets and exponentially increasing computational power, the dominant approach to studying human cognitive performance still involves running small numbers of participants through brief experiments in the laboratory
Another study of the same cohort found that alcohol intake reduces the likelihood of poor cognitive function (Britton et al, 2004), though this study did not observe the same reduction in cognitive performance at higher levels of consumption that we found in our analysis
One possible explanation for this difference is that Britton and colleagues focused on whether a participant’s cognitive performance scored in the bottom quintile, as a measure of “poor cognitive function,” while our analysis looked at the average performance at each level of alcohol consumption
Summary
While many scientific fields ranging from biology to the social sciences are being revolutionized by the availability of large datasets and exponentially increasing computational power, the dominant approach to studying human cognitive performance still involves running small numbers of participants through brief experiments in the laboratory. This approach limits the kinds of questions that can be practically studied in important ways. Understanding how demographic and lifestyle factors influence cognitive function has important health and policy implications These questions are often difficult to examine using laboratory-based approaches because they require the experimenter to recruit sufficient numbers of participants across a wide range of demographic backgrounds.
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