jrcsmom

And as noted above this is most definitely not a valid finding because it isn't a random sample.

They are only measuring the population that self selects to play their 'games', which is going to be the subset of the population that is 'entertained' by that variety of games + has the free time to spend on the activities, so in a population such as Lafayette, you're only looking at a handful of bored college students and not taking a random sample of the whole population.

Taking a sample of 500 in a population of 50,000+ might be a valid sample size if it's a random sample, but when only looking at the participants that choose to participate, the results are incredibly skewed.

So, yes, it's a worthless study, but I was entertained by the results none the less.

bclintonk

Hmm . . . Here's an unmeasured and imprecise conclusion: if you look at the map, it's striking that almost everyplace in the North (i.e., Northeast and Midwest, as far west as MN & IA) is above average, and almost everyplace in the South is . . . not. In the West, the coast is "brainier" than the interior.

But doing well on those games could also be partly a function of prior experience in doing precisely those games, or other games that require similar kinds of "memory, processing speed, flexibility, attention, and problem solving." The whole point of the company is that if you do their games, you're supposed to become better at doing those games, and (they claim) the particular skills you exercise and develop in that process are supposed to translatable into other life contexts. Fine; nothing wrong with that.

They say in their "study" they controlled for age and gender, but they didn't say they controlled for prior gaming experience. If they didn't, I'm inclined to regard it as a pile of hooey that probably tells us mainly which cities have the most people spending the most time doing certain kinds of gaming. Is that a good thing, or not? Color me skeptical.

Or maybe it tells us which cities are places where residents really feel they have nothing better to do. Certainly I'd put Lafayette in that categogy.

absweetmarie

I'm inclined to agree with you, bclintonk, about what playing the games may (or may not) measure. I've not played any of the games myself so I have no first-hand anecdotal experience of their efficacy. Also, clearly, the study is part of the company's marketing and PR efforts.

Notwithstanding the marketing and PR agenda of the study, the guy who designed it is a published (peer-reviewed, PubMed indexed pubs) author with a PhD in cognitive science from Stanford. I'm inclined to give the young man a teensy benefit of the doubt and assume that he exercised some intellectual integrity in designing the study, whatever the limits of its significance. (And, again, it's the online source that came up with the catchy "brainiest cities" label, not the Lumosity researchers themselves.)

Now, I'm not going to move from the Chicago area to Springfield in response to the findings, but they're mildly provocative and certainly not worthy of contempt. Questioning, sure. But contempt? To guffaw at the findings as if they're complete nonsense seems a bit presumptuous. I don't really understand why it's so hard for people to be skeptical and respectful at the same time.

BTW, I'm not a big game player myself. However, by dint of obsessive repetition I have become a pretty awesome Tetris player. This, sadly, appears to have no real-world benefits.

g0ld3n

The list was a good chuckle. Worth the 15 seconds for the laugh.

ajhhs12

Wasn't Ann Arbor voted America's smartest city by Forbes or some other trustworthy source? So why isn't it on the list..? And what about Ithaca and Princeton...

noimagination

So...where's the data? Where are the details of the statistical analysis? I don't even know where to start evaluating this; there isn't enough information.

loldanielol

What about NYC? Wall Street has arguably some of the smartest people in America and the world (brain drain).

absweetmarie

Well, there you go, noimagination. That's an excellent point. The full details are not available (or if they are none of us has located them). One response is to assume the study design was flawed and (as some people have done) guffaw and snort based on one's own anecdotal sense of where smart people congregate ... or not. Another response, mine, is to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt while not perhaps deciding to move the family based on the findings. Your approach, IMO, is the most reasonable given that the raw data don't appear to be available.

Anyone know where to find the original data?

In the meantime, why don't people just throw out the names of the cities and metro areas where they think the smart people live?

jrcsmom

But you don't need access to the original data to determine the validity of this study.

It only takes an extremely basic knowledge of statistical analysis to know that for results to be valid a significant sample needs to be taken from the population being studied.

Since only the people that chose to participate in the games were analyzed, the results CAN NOT be extrapolated to the entire populations of the city.

What this study does show is that the people who chose to participate in the games in these select regions performed the best, but it does not indicate that that subset of the populations is characteristic of the larger population.


I'm not certain where the 'smartest' people may be, but I'll say they are probably where the greatest number of people don't blindly buy into every 'study' that's published.

absweetmarie

The author of the article that launched this thread may implicitly suggest one can extrapolate from the study to the population at large. That, IMO, is sloppy journalism. It doesn't mean the researchers purport that and, indeed, there's no evidence they do. I certainly haven't drawn that conclusion. But the results such as they are, measuring what they do, are interesting enough on their own.

noimagination

Just curious...what exactly is interesting about the results? How do you interpret them?

MizzBee

In defense of Lafayette, that MSA also probably includes Wabash and DePauw. Wabash alone is home to the Brainy Gamer-his blog is famous in the academic gaming world and his students would help increase the scores no doubt. West Lafayette has an incredible public school system and it is home to several small tech companies filled with alums that are lured to stick around by the low taxes. Since it is nothing but cornfields (as I grew up in the middle of those cornfields 25 miles away) surounding the school, those who are using those programs are not the ones that are working those corn and soy fields. It has the advantage of being a place where those that are smart are REALLY smart, and those that arent wouldn't be fiddling with a computer program anyway.

dwincho

LOL, Syracuse and Rochester? Why is upstate NY such a blighted mess, then?

applejack

It's cute how many responses to this list are, "Wait! College X is in city X! Why isn't it higher?"

Really captures the narrow thinking of so many on this forum, as well as their lack of real world experience. Maybe you just have to spend enough time working with people with PhDs from top universities to see firsthand that there's a huge difference between being smart and being educated.

jrcsmom

@MizzBee - EXACTLY! There are indeed some extremely intelligent people in Lafayette (I think it would be difficult to find any town or city where there aren't at least a few exceptionally intelligent people) and with Purdue being a very STEM based school, there are going to be numerous students with the logical thought processes to excel on these games and that have the time and the interest in participating in them. However there are a lot of other people in Lafayette. This study shows that those people in Lafayette that chose to participate in the games were in the 2nd best metro area in the nation. The participants in Lafayette did indeed outperform those almost anywhere else.

However it can not be extrapolated to the population of Lafayette as a whole. You can not say Lafayette's population is a 'brainy' area, only that those people from Lafayette who chose to partipate were a 'brainy' group.

I hate quoting Wiki, but I ran across this and do like the quote:

In statistics, self-selection bias arises in any situation in which individuals select themselves into a group, causing a biased sample with nonprobability sampling. It is commonly used to describe situations where the characteristics of the people which cause them to select themselves in the group create abnormal or undesirable conditions in the group.

Self-selection bias is a major problem in research in sociology, psychology, economics and many other social sciences.[1] In such fields, a poll suffering from such bias is termed a self-selecting opinion poll or "SLOP".[2]

(Self-selection bias - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)