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As of yet, visual working memory (WM) training has failed to yield consistent cognitive benefits to performance in untrained tasks, despite large improvements in trained tasks. Investigating the mechanisms underlying training effects can help explain these inconsistencies. In this pre-registered, pre-test/post-test online training study, we examine...
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Context 1
... the groups were comparable regarding their gender and age, but the evidence for the absence of group differences was ambiguous. Figure 2 illustrates the training and transfer tasks. In pre-test and post-test, each experimental task comprised 20 practice trials and 120 testing trials with a set size of the stimulus array of 4 items in the visual WM tasks, and 16 items in the visual search task. ...
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There is a debate about whether working memory (WM) representations are individual features or bound objects. While spatial attention is reported to play a significant role in feature binding, little is known about the role of spatial attention in WM. To address this gap, the current study required participants to maintain multiple items in their W...
Citations
... However, the evidence for such a substantial role of individual differences in the effectiveness of working memory training is mixed [16,17], and the adequate analysis methodologically challenging [18,19]. Another, not mutually exclusive, explanation is that training solely fosters the acquisition of paradigmspecific strategies and routines [20] and stimulispecific expertise [21], thereby enabling people to use their existing cognitive capacity more efficiently without expanding its limits [12]. Enhanced efficiency will boost performance in the trained task but may rarely generalise to other contexts for which it is unclear how or why these newly acquired strategies and expertise can be applied. ...
Affordable and easy-to-administer interventions such as cognitive training, cognitively stimulating everyday leisure activities, and non-invasive brain stimulation techniques, are promising avenues to counteract age-related cognitive decline and support people in maintaining cognitive health into late adulthood. However, the same pattern of findings emerges across all three fields of cognitive intervention research: whereas improvements within the intervention context are large and often reliable, generalisation to other cognitive abilities and contexts are severely limited. These findings suggest that while cognitive interventions can enhance the efficiency with which people use their existing cognitive capacity, these interventions are unlikely to expand existing capacity limits. Therefore, future research investigating generalisation of enhanced efficiency constitutes a promising avenue for developing reliably effective cognitive interventions.
