Training of Verbal Working Memory at Sentence Level Fails to Show Transfer

Abstract

During the past decades, working memory (WM) training has attracted considerable research attention, but its transfer to untrained tasks is still controversial. In a randomized controlled trial, we investigated the possible transfer effects of a novel sentence-level WM training regime. Sixty-eight healthy Finnish adults were randomized into either a WM training group or an active control group. The WM training group practiced for 4 weeks with two adaptive sentence-level WM training tasks, namely, a novel sentence-level updating task and a Reading span task. The active control group practiced on a quiz task that called for long-term memory but did not load on WM. There were no statistically significant training effects on the pre-post measures of near and far transfer. We suggest that the lack of training effects may reflect the specificity and automaticity of the sentence-processing system.Keywords: working memory training, verbal working memory, sentence processing, near transfer, task-specific near transfer inTrODUcTiOn Working memory (WM) refers to a mental platform for temporary maintenance, access, manipulation, and coordination of information (Baddeley, 2000). It is a cornerstone for several important cognitive abilities, such as reasoning (Süß et al., 2002;Conway et al., 2003), executive control (Poole and Kane, 2009), and multitasking (Konig et al., 2005;Hambrick et al., 2010). The influence of WM extends even further as WM has been shown to be highly predictive of academic and professional success (Gathercole et al., 2004;Alloway and Alloway, 2010).The key role of WM in cognition has motivated numerous intervention studies that have sought to improve WM abilities with intensive computerized training. Despite very promising early findings (e.g., Jaeggi et al., 2008;Chein and Morrison, 2010), recent meta-analyses on WM training indicate mainly near transfer (i.e., improvements in other, untrained WM tasks), while far-transfer effects (i.e., improvements on tasks tapping other cognitive domains) have been very small (Melby-Lervåg and Hulme, 2013;Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016;Soveri et al., 2017). The most recent meta-analysis examined the near-transfer effects in more detail by separating task-specific near transfer (untrained tasks representing the same task paradigm as the training task and differing only by stimuli) from task-general near transfer (untrained WM tasks structurally different from the training task). The results showed that WM training studies yield moderate task-specific near transfer, while task-general near-transfer effects are very small . Thus, current evidence indicates that WM training produces quite specific and temporary task improvements that do not affect everyday cognitive performances (Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016). Given the limited generalizability of WM training, one way to move forward would be to start employing WM training tasks that bear more similarity to everyday cognitive challenges. Several researchers have pointed out that current WM training tasks represent rather artif...

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“…Practice distribution may influence motivation during the period of training, however, since our participants’ level of motivation increased with massed practice and decreased with spaced practice. Fellman et al [62] also reported a significant decrease in motivation during the training. We speculate that motivation declines over time.…”

“…Zhao et al [61] found that higher levels of motivation were related to greater training gains, but not to transfer effects. Fellman et al [62] reported that participants’ self-perceived training gains were not substantiated by their actual performance. Given these inconclusive results, it seemed worthwhile to further investigate the link between motivational and self-perception variables on the one hand, and training-related performance on the other.…”

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“…The proportion of correctly recalled words, regardless of the order they were recalled in, was used as the outcome variable. See Fellman et al ( 2017 ) for details.…”

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