Investigating the Effects of Spacing on Working Memory Training Outcome: A Randomized, Controlled, Multisite Trial in Older Adults

Abstract

Objective The majority of the population will experience some cognitive decline with age. Therefore, the development of effective interventions to mitigate age-related decline is critical for older adults’ cognitive functioning and their quality of life. Methods In our randomized controlled multisite trial, we target participants’ working memory (WM) skills, and in addition, we focus on the intervention’s optimal scheduling in order to test whether and how the distribution of training sessions might affect task learning, and ultimately, transfer. Healthy older adults completed an intervention targeting either WM or general knowledge twice per day, once per day, or once every-other-day. Before and after the intervention and 3 months after training completion, participants were tested in a variety of cognitive domains, including those representing functioning in everyday life. Results In contrast to our hypotheses, spacing seems to affect learning only minimally. We did observe some transfer effects, especially within the targeted cognitive domain (WM and inhibition/interference), which remained stable at the 3-month follow-up. Discussion Our findings have practical implications by showing that the variation in training schedule, at least within the range used here, does not seem to be a crucial element for training benefits.

Activity Engagement and Cognitive Performance Amongst Older Adults

“…Data for this analysis are combined from two broader multi-site interventions targeting cognitive and metacognitive skills amongst healthy older adults ( Jaeggi et al, 2020 ). In total, 274 participants were recruited between Southern California and Southeast Michigan.…”

“…Cognitive performance was measured as a global composite consisting of measures of WM, episodic memory, and processing speed. All cognitive tasks are described in Jaeggi et al (2020) . Each cognitive domain was assessed with three separate tasks in order to capture various aspects of those constructs and to minimize task-specific error variance.…”

“…Working memory consisted of three individual tasks. The first task used was the Spatial n-back ( Jaeggi et al, 2020 ) to assess WM updating and was administered via tablet. Stimuli were presented in a moving window that lasted for 1,000 ms with an interstimulus of 2,500 ms. Stimuli were presented one at a time on various locations of a diamond shape composed of circles.…”

“…Cognitive performance was measured as a global composite consisting of measures of WM, episodic memory, and processing speed. All cognitive tasks are described in Jaeggi et al (2020).…”

Getting at Underlying Mechanisms of Far Transfer - the Mediating Role of Near Transfer

“…Participants in the active control group trained on a task that consists of general knowledge, vocabulary, social science, and trivia multiple-choice questions as used previously 75,94 . They were encouraged to follow the same schedule as the N-back training group (two 20-minute sessions per day).…”