I don't know any of those but could it be that Lumosity is just harder on your brain making you more tired and mentally exhausted? I mean, if a group relaxes for 8 hours and other group does lumosity for 8 hrs, why should the second group do better after exhausting their brains for so long?
Good question, I think there was a break between the training and the posttest, but it isn't quite clear from the description in the paper:
"Each participant spent 10 h in the study, which spanned four separate sessions in the on-campus laboratory of the university, across 1-2 weeks. Each of the first three sessions lasted 3 h. Session 4 lasted one hour - solely for administering the posttest battery. At the beginning of the first session, subjects in both conditions were asked to read and sign the consent form. After signing the form, subjects were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions. All subjects were then administered an online set of pretests. Once they finished the pretests, they logged in to play their assigned game for the rest of the first session. They continued to play their assigned game for the entire second and third session (for a total of 8 h of gameplay). During the last session, they completed the online set of posttests."
"Before and after 8 h of gameplay, subjects completed an online pretest and posttest battery of tests measuring our focal constructs and their relevant facets."
Sounds like the post-test was done separately to me.
Session 1 is probably about 2 hours of "training", with the rest of the time eaten up by the pretest and consent paperwork. Sessions 2 and 3 would be be almost entirely training (3 hrs each), which gets you to 8 hours of training in 3 sessions, leaving the last one for just the post-test.
