Transfer and Motivation After Cognitive Control Training for Remitted Depression in Healthy Sample

Given that cognitive control deficits following remission from depression form a risk factor for recurrence, new interventions aimed at improving cognitive control such as cognitive control training are being developed. Previous studies suggest that motivation and engagement can influence the effectiveness of cognitive training. As such, we developed a gamified cognitive control training procedure. Before validating this tool in a clinical sample, a convenience sample was used to ensure that gamification did not add any unwanted side effects to the cognitive training procedure. This study was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework (osf.io/5yacs). Following a baseline assessment, participants were assigned to one of four training conditions, manipulating training task (cognitive control vs. active control) and gamification level (low vs. high). Having performed 10 sessions, participants were invited for a post-training assessment. The impact of gamification on cognitive transfer, motivation, and emotional transfer was investigated. Our results suggest task-specific cognitive transfer. In line with our hypotheses, gamification level did not affect cognitive transfer while beneficially impacting motivation. Moreover, beneficial effects of gamified cognitive control training were found for self-reported anxiety levels, in the absence of effects on the other clinical outcomes. This study showed that the newly developed gamified cognitive control training procedure yields similar effects as non-gamified cognitive control training. However, the advantage of this newly developed version is that it is more user-friendly, easy-to-use, online, and that its settings maximize user motivation and engagement, potentially enabling a more effective training.