Many of these improvements remain over the course of several months, suggesting that the benefits of the training are long lasting.
Charlotte, NC (PRWEB) December 11, 2013
While there are thousands of games to choose from on Apple’s App Store, very few of them actually teach the user or strengthen any of the user’s functional skills. P.U.S.H. Buttons is a memory-based iOS game that is fun to play, yet challenges players to test their retention and recall skills to complete the game.
The game’s intent, besides being a fun source of entertainment, is to test and improve the player’s working memory. Working memory is the part of short-term memory concerned with immediate conscious perceptual and linguistic processing. Scientific studies suggest that working-memory training can improve a gamut of skills. The fundamental brain-training exercise in this field has been the “n-back” task, a working memory task that requires an individual to mentally juggle several items simultaneously, just like in the game P.U.S.H. Buttons; participants must remember both the recent stimuli and an increasing number of stimuli before it (e.g., the stimulus “1-back,” “2-back,” etc).
Through numerous experiments over the past decade, Susanne Jaeggi of the University of Maryland, College Park found that participants who train with n-back tasks over the course of approximately one month for twenty minutes per day not only get better at the n-back task itself, but also experience transfer to other cognitive tasks outside of the training.
“The effects generalize to important domains such as attentional control, reasoning, reading, or mathematical skills,” notes Jaeggi. “Many of these improvements remain over the course of several months, suggesting that the benefits of the training are long lasting.”
In P.U.S.H. Buttons, the game’s protagonist, Professor Buttons, is building a machine to win a science convention. Like any mad scientist, he requires a rather odd assortment of items to complete the project and could use some help. The player’s task is to help Professor Buttons collect all the eclectic items for his Perpetual Unstoppable Synchronization Hub, or P.U.S.H. Essentially, the P.U.S.H. is a deliberately over-engineered machine that performs simple tasks, similar to the popular board game Mouse Trap. To run the P.U.S.H. successfully, the player must work through increasingly difficult levels of mind stimulating memory challenges.
P.U.S.H. Buttons is the creation of Rashed Al-Khalifa, who got the idea for the game after attending the World Memory Championships in London this past year. He was amazed at how the competitors could recall as many as 200 numbers with ease. This experience inspired Al-Khalifa to create an app that could help people improve their memory, but in a way that is so much fun, they don’t even know they’re brushing up on their memory skills.
To learn more about the P.U.S.H. Buttons app, or download it today from the iTunes App Store for just $1.99, visit http://bit.ly/PUSHButtons.
About PUSH Buttons
P.U.S.H. Buttons is a new mobile app that is available on the iTunes App Store, and tests users’ memory by playing a series of memory games. The acronym P.U.S.H. stands for perpetual unstoppable synchronization hub, similar to the Mouse Trap board game which was popularized in the 1970’s and buttons comes from Professor Buttons, the app’s protagonist. To learn more about the app, visit http://bit.ly/PUSHButtons.