1 The Challenge of Challenge: Avoiding and Embracing Difficulty in a Memory Game

The central prescriptions for using brain games to improve brain health are progressive challenge and brain domain diversification. Exercising a range of cognitive domains is thought to help build a diverse “cognitive reserve. ” Games that are too easy for a player yield little benefit. Brain games as leisure activities need to be pleasant enough to play to attract and retain players. Designing the appropriate level of challenge is further complicated by vast differences in cognitive abilities between players of different ages and among individual players even if they are the same age. Theories about mindset and motivation suggest that some individuals welcome hard challenges and others avoid challenge. Challenge avoidance has not been studied in the context of game play. Players who make choices that minimize the challenge in a brain game may unintentionally reduce or eliminate the hoped for benefits. This manuscript provides preliminary results of an ongoing study. Game play data is analyzed of players who had played between 95 and 1149 rounds of Keep It In Mind (a memory game). About one fourth devoted most of their rounds of play they could consistently succeed at, resulting in average accuracy scores of 91 % or higher. These challenge avoiders only modestly challenging their memory. Another 42 % tried to remember slightly more items, succeeding 85 % to 90 % of the time. One third were more extreme challenge seekers, so much so that they succeeded only an average of 80 % to 83 % of the time. The middle group appeared to reap more cognitive benefit from playing than did the more extreme approaches to challenge, although the differences approach but do not achieve statistical significance (t=-1.54, df=2,23, p=.138)