Every Neurree game names the study its mechanics came from. This page collects them, including the research that sets a limit on what any of it can do.
Last reviewed 11 October 2026
Practice makes you better at the thing you practise. Whether that spreads to unrelated abilities is genuinely unsettled. The largest review of working-memory training — 87 publications and 145 experimental comparisons — found reliable gains on working-memory measures and no convincing evidence of transfer to verbal ability, reading or arithmetic once an active control group was used.
We build games around findings we can cite, and we do not claim they make you smarter in general. You will see the same caveat inside the app, on every game.
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Two findings shape how the whole app behaves.
Reasoning training holds up over time. In the ACTIVE randomised trial of 2,832 adults, reasoning training still showed an effect on reasoning ten years later, and participants in that trial self-reported less difficulty with everyday tasks. That is a result about the trial’s intervention, not a claim about this app. Memory training did not hold up the same way. That is why three of our nine games train reasoning.
Difficulty has a sweet spot. Learning is fastest when accuracy sits near 85% — roughly one error in six. Neurree tracks how you are actually doing and moves each game towards that rate rather than towards something comfortable.
Nine games. Each one names what it trains — no more than the research supports — and the work its mechanics came from.
Telling a well-formed claim from a true one, and deciding when a claim is worth the cost of checking.
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Building a map in your head rather than a list of turns — and keeping your bearings while you move through it.
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Holding a sequence briefly and rebuilding it — and the grouping strategy that makes that possible.
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Holding one rule steady while the pull is to answer automatically, and noticing the moment you stop.
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Inductive reasoning: extracting a rule from examples and carrying it to a new case.
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Recognising a specific, named reasoning error inside a passage that otherwise reads well.
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Retrieving vocabulary rather than merely recognising it.
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Searching your own vocabulary under time pressure, and switching category when a vein runs dry.
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Reaching across your semantic memory instead of taking the nearest association.
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Practice reliably improves the task you practise. Whether it spreads to unrelated abilities is unsettled: the largest review of working-memory training, covering 87 publications and 145 comparisons, found reliable gains on working-memory measures and no convincing transfer to intelligence, reading or arithmetic when compared against an active control. Reasoning and speed-of-processing training have the strongest durable evidence, with effects still measurable ten years later in the ACTIVE randomised trial.
No, and we do not claim it does. The evidence supports getting better at the trained skill, not a general rise in intelligence. Neurree states what each game trains and stops there.
Learning is fastest at roughly 85% accuracy — about one error in six — according to Wilson, Shenhav, Straccia and Cohen (2019). Neurree adjusts each game to keep you near that rate rather than at a comfortable one, so a session that feels slightly too hard is the session doing its job.
Every game names the published work its mechanics came from, and this page lists all of it with links to the papers. Where the research sets a limit on what the game can do, the app says so on the game’s own briefing screen rather than only here. We do not cite studies we have not read, and we do not claim a study shows more than it does.
Brain-training apps have a long history of claiming more than they can show, and regulators have taken an interest more than once. The honest position is narrower and more useful: say what a game trains, show the work, and name the limit in the same breath. If a claim here is not backed by something you can click, it should not be here — tell us and we will fix it.