While remote data collection is not a new concept, the quality and psychometric properties of data collected remotely often remain unclear. Most remote data collection is done via online survey tools or web-conferencing applications (i.e., Skype or Zoom) and largely involves questionnaires, interviews, or other self-report data. Little research has been done on the collection of cognitive assessments and interventions via web-conferencing that requires multiple sessions with or without the assistance of an experimenter. The present paper discusses limitations and challenges of studies administered remotely, and outlines methods used to overcome such challenges while effectively collecting cognitive performance data remotely via Zoom. We further discuss relative recruitment, retention rates, compliance, and performance findings between in-lab and remotely administered cognitive assessment and intervention studies, as well as limitations to remote data collection. We found that while it was necessary to recruit more participants in remote studies to reach enrollment goals, compliance and performance were largely comparable between in-lab and remotely administered studies, illustrating the opportunities of conducting this type of experimental research remotely with adequate fidelity.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a noninvasive form of electrical brain stimulation popularly used to augment the effects of working memory (WM) training. Although success has been mixed, some studies report enhancements in WM performance persisting days, weeks, or even months that are actually more reminiscent of consolidation effects typically observed in the long-term memory (LTM) domain, rather than WM improvements per se. Although tDCS has been often reported to enhance both WM and LTM, these effects have never been directly compared within the same study. However, given their considerable neural and behavioral overlap, this is a timely comparison to make. This study reports results from a multisession intervention in older adults comparing active and sham tDCS over the left dorsolateral pFC during training on both an n-back WM task and a word learning LTM task. We found strong and robust effects on LTM, but mixed effects on WM that only emerged for those with lower baseline ability. Importantly, mediation analyses showed an indirect effect of tDCS on WM that was mediated by improvements in consolidation. We conclude that tDCS over the left dorsolateral pFC can be used as an effective intervention to foster long-term learning and memory consolidation in aging, which can manifest in performance improvements across multiple memory domains.

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Previous cognitive training research with the change-detection paradigm found only sparse effects that went beyond improvements in the training task but stressed an increase in fidelity of internal memory representations. Motivated by the demanding visual processing requirements of change-detection training, we extended this work by focusing on whether training on a change-detection task would improve visual processing skills. Fifty participants were randomly assigned to train on a change-detection task or on a control task for seven sessions. Participants’ visual processing skills were assessed before and after the intervention, focusing on visual search, contrast sensitivity, and contour integration. Our results suggest a general improvement in perceptual skills that was primarily driven by a conjunction search task and to a much lesser extent by a complex visual search task and a contrast sensitivity task. The data from the conjunction search task further suggest a causal link between training and improvements of perceptual as opposed to attentional processes. Since the change-detection paradigm is commonly used to assess working memory capacity, future research needs to investigate how much of its variance is explained by memory performance and how much is explained by perceptual processes.

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