This article describes exciting new research with rats that indicates that it may be possible to use mental training to harness the young brain's developmental potential to compensate for abnormal neural circuits.

Unfortunately the importance of this research is minimized by the significantly inaccurate statements made in this article about the current state of research and clinical practice of  cognitive remediation with people. Cognitive remediation is an evidence based practice that has moderate effect sizes for treating BOTH cognition and functional outcome in people with schizophrenia ( Wykes et al 2011).

Thus these two statements made in the article are inaccurate:
1. "Historically, these methods, collectively titled cognitive remediation, have been of limited value because they have been applied to patients whose conditions are too advanced to address."  
NOT true! Cognitive remediation has helped people with moderate to severe illness.

2. "This experiment mimicked what is often seen with human schizophrenia patients—that cognitive remediation can improve cognition, but not generally. Improvements are typically limited to particular training tasks, which makes cognitive remediation of limited clinical utility."
NOT true! Cognitive remediation impacts functional outcome in humans, and the effects are most pronounced when the cognitive remediation is done in the context of a psychiatric rehabilitation program.

The research described in this article has important implications for refinements of CR, for example when  and to whom it may be delivered. If the findings translate to research with humans, that would argue for use of CR with prodromal patients. However, it is inaccurate and unfortunate to minimize the therapeutic gains that diagnosed adult patients with schizophrenia make when they participate in cognitive remediation.