Near Transfer, Far Transfer, and What the Evidence Supports

Every brain-training or eye-training product makes some kind of promise. The most important question to ask about any of them is simple: better at what?

Psychologists answer it with two terms, near transfer and far transfer. Understanding them is the best protection against overblown claims, including ours.

Near transfer: getting better at the task

If you practise a task, you get better at it, and usually at very similar tasks too. Play a memory game for a few weeks and your scores on that game will rise. That is near transfer, and nobody seriously disputes it. Every test on this site will show you this kind of improvement if you practise.

Far transfer: getting better at something else

Far transfer is the bigger claim: that practising a screen task improves something quite different, like school grades, reading speed, driving, sport performance or general intelligence. This is what many brain-training adverts suggest.

In 2016 a team led by Daniel Simons published a large review of the evidence used by brain-training companies. They found extensive evidence that people improve on the trained tasks, less evidence for closely related tasks, and little evidence that training improves everyday performance.

What reviews of sport and vision training found

The picture is similar for perceptual-cognitive training in sport. A critical review of NeuroTracker, a 3D tracking tool used by teams, found only one study pointing to a real-world sport benefit and called for larger, better studies. Reviews of other sports-vision tools reach similar conclusions: athletes improve on the tests, but proof of better on-field performance is limited.

Why far transfer is so hard to show

Real skills depend on many things at once: knowledge, strategy, fitness, equipment and experience. Improving one narrow ability on a screen may simply not be the bottleneck. Studies also need good control groups, because people who expect to improve often do better for reasons unrelated to the training.

How we handle this

On this site we say what a task trains and measures, never what it cures or fixes. We expect you to improve at the tests themselves. We do not claim that this makes you a better driver, reader, student or athlete, and we would tell you if good evidence for that appeared.

Two more honest points. Eye exercises do not sharpen your eyesight or reduce a prescription. And none of our tests are medical, IQ or diagnostic tests.

A useful rule for any product

When a product promises big real-world benefits, look for studies with control groups that measured those real-world outcomes directly. If all the evidence is "people got better at the game", that is near transfer, and it is not the same thing.