Showcase 2025: UAlbany Senior Explores the Psychology of Sudoku

By Erin Frick 

ALBANY, N.Y. (April 22, 2025) — University at Albany Honors College senior Mauricio Rodriguez believes in the cognitive benefits of puzzle-solving.

Puzzles have long been shown to have positive effects on reducing stress and maintaining or improving mental acuity, especially within the aging population. They are often used in clinical settings to exercise cognitive functions like working memory, recall and processing speed, and are commonly included in treatment plans for people with various neurodegenerative disorders. 

A benefit that has been less studied is the effect of puzzle-solving on attention span. 

“After playing Sudoku for a while, I’ve noticed slight improvements in my ability to concentrate and perform certain tasks,” Rodriguez said. “So, I have this intuitive feeling that playing Sudoku is ‘good,’ and my research questions are about how ‘good’ it is, and whether this benefit is generalizable. We hear about this sort of thing quite often in the popular media — that is, how different games will ‘raise your IQ.’ Sudoku is always a top contender, along with chess and crosswords. Clearly, we accept that puzzle-solving has cognitive benefits, but there isn’t much quantifiable research to back it up. That’s what I’m working to do now.” 

Rodriguez’s interest in psychology started in high school, where he began to learn about how the discipline has made it possible to study and better understand people. Now a psychology major in UAlbany's College of Arts and Sciences, Rodriguez has participated in a variety of research projects pertaining to eclectic topics including eating disorders and athletic behaviors, interactions in romantic partnerships, industrial organizational psychology, and effects of emotion on cognition. 

Most recently, his work has focused on a longstanding love: Sudoku, the Japanese logic puzzle that requires the solver to fill nine 9x9 squares with the digits 1 through 9. Rodriguez will present this work at UAlbany Showcase on Wednesday, April 30. 

Exploring cognitive impacts of Sudoku

“Despite the worldwide popularity of Sudoku puzzles, very little has been done to study their cognitive benefits, specifically on attention,” Rodriguez said. “I think Sudoku could be a stupendous tool for achieving real cognitive improvement, but like many questions in psychology, we have yet to find out.”

Working in the Cognition and Language Laboratory under the advisement of Professor of Psychology Jeanette Altarriba and doctoral student Dailyn Clark, Rodriguez designed an experiment to begin answering this question. 

The study asked whether focusing on solving two kinds of puzzles — Sudoku and mazes — could help improve students’ attention spans. Rodriguez engaged 200 UAlbany students to participate in the study. Those in the experimental group were asked to work on a Sudoku puzzle for ten minutes. Next, they were prompted to complete a letter detection task, which can be used to measure attention span. The participants then repeated the process, but worked on solving a maze instead of a Sudoku. A control group watched a nature documentary in lieu of puzzle-solving.

“The goal here was to assess whether concentrating on a puzzle for ten minutes led to an increase in attention span, seen through higher scores on the letter detection task,” Rodriguez said. “In this case, we didn’t see an effect from puzzles, but this also isn’t entirely unexpected because we were assessing results after a single instance of attention training. To get a clearer picture of the potential cognitive benefits of puzzle-solving, we would need to assess cumulative effects over time.”

After graduating in May with minors in sociology and French, Rodriguez will transition into UAlbany’s cognitive psychology doctoral program in the Cognition and Language Laboratory, where plans are set to continue exploring this very question. The work dovetails with another line of research that Rodriguez is actively pursuing: the problem of rating Sudoku difficulty levels. 

“Sudoku puzzle difficulty is typically rated by its publisher,” Rodriguez said. “Within the Sudoku community, there are also ways of rating puzzle difficulty based on the types of logic techniques required to solve it. For example, in cognitive psychology, we love to talk about the two main types of reasoning: deductive and inductive. Because you often find your answer through process of elimination, Sudoku is mainly a deductive reasoning game. There’s a whole roster of other logic-based strategies that the community has devised internally which can be used to assign a rating, but currently, there’s a lot of subjectivity.”

Rodriguez is working to design a holistic formula that accounts for the sophistication of different kinds of logic techniques, and how often they appear in a given puzzle, to eventually devise a systematic way to rate Sudoku puzzle difficulty. Why is this important? Rodriguez likens the concept to athletics. 

“I have this theory that the differing difficulties of puzzles that you interact with might result in different types of cognitive outcomes,” Rodriguez said. “Consider a weightlifter. They become stronger after they progressively overload their weight, continuously but slowly tearing down their muscles, and then later they rebuild and have more endurance and strength to match the demands of weightlifting. I want to apply that type of logic to puzzle-solving. 

“If you only play easy puzzles, maybe you'll see some form of cognitive improvement. But maybe it could be even better if you gradually increase the difficulty, because then you have to expend more mental resources. The brain is a muscle, after all, and it makes sure to offer adequate amounts of mental resources to match your cognitive demands. That's my overarching goal, two or so years from now, I'd like to be able to answer that question.” 

You can meet Mauricio Rodriguez and learn more about his work at UAlbany Showcase on Wednesday, April 30. More than 500 students from the College of Arts and Sciences will be displaying their recent work throughout the Lecture Center Concourse. Catch Rodriguez at his poster from 9-10 a.m. in the Research Foundation Zone. He will also deliver two oral presentations in LC 6 from 10-11 a.m.