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What actually transfers
Against that background, a short list of things that did move something beyond the trained task. Almost all of them are strategy rather than drill, which is why every Time Gates drill carries a strategy layer.
| Approach | What it is | The result | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| If-then plans | A concrete rule linking a cue to a response, stated before the task: "If I hear the tone, then I will not press any key." | Gawrilow & Gollwitzer (2008): children with attention difficulties given an if-then plan on a go/no-go task cut commission errors to the level of children without them. Later work showed fewer perseverative errors on a shifting task and better delay of gratification. The plan delegates control to the cue, so the response fires without effortful willpower. | Strong for the task |
| Metacognitive strategy routines | An explicit loop: stop, focus, state the goal, split into steps, check. | Supported in adults and in adolescents after brain injury at five-year follow-up; a randomised trial in adolescents aged 12–18 is running to 2026 with no results yet. | Moderate |
| Concreteness training | Practising "what did I notice, and what would I do" instead of "why did this happen to me". | Topper et al. (2017, n = 251) tested a six-week programme combining several strategies, delivered in a group or through guided online work. Twelve-month depression prevalence was 15.3% and 14.7%, compared with 32.4% on a waitlist. This result belongs to the whole programme, not concrete thinking alone. A separate experiment in young adolescents found better immediate social problem solving with concrete rather than abstract thinking instructions. | Positive results for the whole programme; separate evidence for the brief exercise |
| Memory specificity training | Repeated practice recalling one event that happened on one particular day, in detail. | Meta-analysis (Barry, Sze & Raes 2019, k = 13): specificity d = 1.08, mood d = −0.29 at post-test - but gains "mostly lost by follow-up". A computerised version in 15–25-year-olds (n = 359) raised specificity at one month (d = 0.42) but not at three or six. | Moderate, and it fades |
| Episodic specificity induction | A short guided interview about a just-watched video that pushes toward detail: what did the room look like, who was there, what happened first. | Afterwards people recall more detail, imagine futures in more detail, solve social problems better, and score higher on divergent thinking. Effects last minutes to hours, not weeks. Not tested in adolescents. | Strong acute Weak durable |
| Emotional-content working memory | The same inhibition and memory drills, run on faces and tense social material instead of shapes and digits. | Schweizer et al. (2013): training with emotional material, not neutral material, transferred to emotion regulation. A trial of emotional working-memory training over ten sessions improved inhibitory control, and adolescent affective-control trials found changes covarying with mental-health changes. | Moderate |
| Task-oriented motor training | Practising the actual task - catching, carrying, stepping - with a goal-plan-do-check self-talk loop, rather than "sensory integration" exercises. | 2025 meta-analysis of randomised trials: overall motor skills g = 0.57, balance g = 0.76, activity performance g = 0.71. Process-oriented approaches were not significant (g = 0.15). Ages 4–13, so moderate for teenagers. | Strong |
| Cognitively engaging movement | Movement that also demands rule-following, switching or timing - ball sports, dance, martial arts - not plain running. | 2024 meta-analysis (23 trials, 2,857 young people): executive function SMD 0.32, inhibition 0.35, working memory 0.34. Larger with more than six weeks, more than two sessions a week, more than twenty minutes. Open-skill activity beats repetitive aerobic work for inhibition. | Moderate |
| Heart-rate-variability biofeedback | Breathing at about six breaths a minute while watching a live readout of your own heart rhythm. | Goessl et al. 2017 (24 studies): 0.81 pre–post and 0.83 against control for self-reported stress and anxiety. Lehrer et al. 2020 (58 studies) found the largest effects for anxiety, low mood, anger and performance, and smaller effects for cognition. In children and adolescents the base is thinner: medium-to-large effects, but small and often uncontrolled studies. | Strong in adults Moderate in teens |
| Cyclic sighing | Two inhales through the nose, the second a top-up, then a long slow exhale. Five minutes a day. | Balban et al. 2023: a remote randomised trial in about 110 adults over one month found all four breathing arms improved mood, and cyclic sighing gave the biggest gain in positive mood and the biggest drop in resting breathing rate, beating meditation. Adults only, self-reported mood, roughly 25–30 per arm. | Moderate |
The pattern
Read down that table and the shape is clear. The cheapest and best-evidenced lever available to a piece of software is strategy, not drill: a plan stated before the block, a routine for getting unstuck, a mode of thinking practised deliberately. The second lever is physical and mostly off-screen, which is why Time Gates coaches movement rather than simulating it.
The drills are still worth building. They are the thing the strategy is attached to, they give fast honest feedback, and several of them are excellent measures. But they are the vehicle, not the mechanism, and the product's copy says so.
The rule this produces
Every drill in Time Gates is preceded by an if-then plan and followed by a short reflection. It costs ten seconds and one screen, and it is the single manipulation in this document with direct evidence of normalising commission errors.
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