If you are skilled at playing puzzles on your smartphone or tablet, what does it say about how fast you learn new puzzles, or, more broadly, how well you can focus, say, in school or at work? Or, in the language of psychologists, does “near transfer” predict “far transfer”?
A team of psychologists at UC Riverside and UC Irvine reports in Nature Human Behaviorthat people who show near transfer are more likely to show far transfer. For a person skilled at playing a game, such as Wordle, near transfer refers to being skilled at similar games, such as a crossword puzzle. An example of far transfer for this person is better focus in daily living activities.
“Some people do very well in training, such as playing a video game, but they don’t show near transfer perhaps because they are using highly specific strategies,” said first author Anja Pahor, an assistant research psychologist at UCR…
