The malleability of working memory and visuospatial skills: A randomized controlled study in older adults.

Abstract

There is accumulating evidence that training on working memory (WM) generalizes to other nontrained domains, and there are reports of transfer effects extending as far as to measures of fluid intelligence. Although there have been several demonstrations of such transfer effects in young adults and children, they have been difficult to demonstrate in older adults. In this study, we investigated the generalizing effects of an adaptive WM intervention on nontrained measures of WM and visuospatial skills. We randomly assigned healthy older adults to train on a verbal n-back task over the course of a month for either 10 or 20 sessions. Their performance change was compared with that of a control group. Our results revealed reliable group effects in nontrained standard clinical measures of WM and visuospatial skills in that both training groups outperformed the control group. We also observed a dose-response effect, that is, a positive relationship between training frequency and the gain in visuospatial skills; this finding was further confirmed by a positive correlation between training improvement and transfer. The improvements in visuospatial skills emerged even though the intervention was restricted to the verbal domain. Our work has important implications in that our data provide further evidence for plasticity of cognitive functions in old age.

Age-specific differences of dualn-back training

“…To date, studies approaching this issue have been scarce (but see Brehmer et al, 2012;Zinke et al, 2014), although several studies have shown transfer effects after WM training to other cognitive functions, including verbal learning and memory (Richmond et al, 2011), language comprehension (Carretti et al, 2012), and VS skills (Stepankova et al, 2014). Executive functions, however, are essential in successful autonomous functioning in everyday life (Miyake & Friedman, 2012) and they are generally negatively affected by aging (Raz, 2000;Salthouse et al, 2003).…”

“…Both near and far transfer were also found in a study by Carretti, Borella, Zavagnin, and De Beni (2012), who observed improvements in a verbal WM updating task as well as in language comprehension after verbal WM span training. A study by Stepankova et al (2014) showed near transfer after verbal n-back training to untrained measures of WM and far transfer to visuospatial (VS) skills.…”

Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory: a meta-analysis

“…Furthermore, we have previously described a dose-dependent relationship between training and transfer, such that more training leads to more gain (Jaeggi et al, 2008). This relationship has been replicated in some studies (Basak, Boot, Voss, & Kramer, 2008;Dahlin, Backman, Neely, & Nyberg, 2009;Stepankova et al, 2014;Tomic & Klauer, 1996), but not others . We hypothesized that this dosage effect would hold up across studies in the form of a positive correlation between number of training sessions and degree of transfer.…”

Questions of age differences in interference control: When and how, not if?

“…The centrality of attention and working memory to cognitive aging has made them attractive targets for training (e.g., Stepankova et al, 2014; see reviews by Backman and Nyberg (2013); Lovden et al (2010); Lustig et al (2009)). Patterns of improvement and transfer in these interventions also provide clues as to the mechanisms that underlie age effects on cognition.…”