Cambridge Brain Sciences provides scientifically proven tools for the assessment of cognitive function over the web.

The Cambridge Brain Sciences concept was developed by Dr Adam Hampshire and Dr Adrian M. Owen at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge UK, with a grant from MRC Technology's Development Gap Fund. The website was developed in conjunction with web agency Studio 24.

The concept has two aims:

1) To provide a freely available web-based platform for members of the public and the wider scientific community to assess their cognitive function using rigorously tested and scientifically proven tests of memory, attention, reasoning and planning. All of the test made available on the site have been used in scientific studies of brain function by Dr Owen and his team at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and have been described in more than 150 scientific publications in leading academic journals. 

Many of the tests have been used in functional neuroimaging studies (using PET and fMRI) to show how cognitive functions such as memory, planning and attention are mediated by specific regions of the brain (a field colloquially known as 'brain mapping'). In other studies, these tests have been used to investigate why some of these cognitive functions become impaired in disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia and after traumatic brain damage caused by injuries to the head. An additional interest of the team is how performance on these tests (and the cognitive processes that they measure) improves over time with training.

By making these tests widely and freely available, Cambridge Brain Sciences aims to further our understanding of human cognition with a view to mediating against the effects of brain damage and disease.

2) To provide a web-based platform for the controlled assessment of cognitive function in targeted groups of individuals for the purposes of scientific investigation, including clinical and pharmaceutical trials. The Cambridge Brain Sciences platform has recently been used by a major pharmaceutical company to conduct an entirely web-based trial of a novel compound. Clinical trials involving various patient groups are also underway.