The Long and Winding Road to Real-Life Experiments: Remote Assessment of Executive Functions with Computerized Games—Results from 8 Years of Naturalistic Interventions

MELINA VLADISAUSKAS; GABRIEL O. PAZ; VERÓNICA NIN; JESÚS A. GUILLÉN; LAOUEN BELLOLI; HERNÁN DELGADO; MARTÍN A. MIGUEL; DANIELA MACARIO CABRAL; DIEGO E. SHALOM; ANNA FORÉS; ALEJANDRA CARBONI; DIEGO FERNÁNDEZ-SLEZAK; ANDREA P. GOLDIN

Brain Sciences

Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

Año: 2024 vol. 14

Mate Marote is an open-access cognitive training software aimed at children between4 and 8 years old. It consists of a set of computerized games specifically tailored to train and evaluateExecutive Functions (EF), a class of processes critical for purposeful, goal-directed behavior, includingworking memory, planning, flexibility, and inhibitory control. Since 2008, several studies wereperformed with this software at children’s own schools in interventions supervised in-person bycognitive scientists. After 2015, we incorporated naturalistic, yet controlled, interventions withchildren’s own teachers’ help. The platform includes a battery of standardized tests, disguised asgames, to assess children’s EF. The main question that emerges is whether the results, obtained withthese traditional tasks but conducted without the presence of researchers, are comparable to thosewidely reported in the literature, that were obtained in more supervised settings. In this study, wewere able to replicate the expected difficulty and age effects in at least one of the analyzed dependentvariables of each employed test. We also report important discrepancies between the expected andthe observed response time patterns, specifically for time-constrained tasks. We hereby discuss thebenefits and setbacks of a new possible strategy for this type of assessment in naturalistic settings.We conclude that this battery of established EF tasks adapted for its remote usage is appropriate tomeasure the expected mental processes in naturalistic settings, enriching opportunities to upscalecognitive training interventions at schools. These types of tools can constitute a concerted strategy tobring together educational neuroscience research and real-life practice.