A Review of Working Memory Training | CogPsyLab

Working memory is a core brain function underlying all higher cognition. There has been a lot of interest in the past decade about the potential to train working memory capacity to improve overall cognitive performance. In this article we review higher order cognitive skills (HOCS), their basis in working memory and the evidence for the effectiveness of different training methods for expanding working memory capacity.

Our mental abilities or cognitive skills can be divided into Lower-Order Cognitive Skills (LOCS) and Higher-Order Cognitive Skills (HOCS).

LOCS include memorization of content for simple recall ? like remembering facts for a history exam. LOCS also include the kind of attention-improving skills that video games may improve with practice. LOCS includes any cognitive skills with specific applications that do not require much understanding, evaluation, or problem solving flexibility.

HOCS involves higher level skills such as application of knowledge in new situations, flexible problem solving, critical thinking, decision making, comprehension, creativity, and the self-management of one?s own thoughts and behaviors to be a better learner ? more skilled, more flexible, and better adapted.

?HOCs are more important than ever. With the rapid pace of technological and cultural change on a global scale, and the challenges of adapting to this change, student and citizens need to go beyond the building of their knowledge capacity: they need to develop their higher-order thinking skills. HOCS are needed for all purposeful, reasoned, and goal-directed thinking. They are an important to all successful, adaptive behaviour in everyday life as well as educational and professional life.

Working memory (WM) is the core brain function critical for all HOCS. It can be considered as the main control centre of human cognition generally, as illustrated in this BrainScanr graph (Figure 1).

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Working memory is necessary for staying focused on a task, blocking out distractions,? keeping you updated and aware of what is going on in this process, and applying relevant cognitive strategies to process the information. Working memory impairments result in loss of attentional focus ? such as difficultly focusing on reading a text; or memory problems, such as forgetting what to do in the few seconds of walking from one room to the another, or being easily distracted while trying to focus on a task and not being able to finish an activity according to plan.

Working memory can be defined in everyday language as a set of skills that helps us keep information in mind while using that information to complete a task or execute a challenge. Baddeley has defined it as:

a brain system that provides temporary storage and manipulation of the information necessary for such complex cognitive tasks as language comprehension, learning, and reasoning. (Baddeley, 2003, p. 189)

More technically it has been defined as:

a flexible, capacity limited, mental workspace used to store and process information in the service of on-going cognition? (Morrison & Chein, 2011, p. 233)

Or:

Limited capacity system that includes a short-term storage of information and the functions of updating and manipulating the storage contents. ?(Salminen, Strobach & Schubert, 2012, p. 23)

Working memory makes central use of short term memory storage, and attention control. When you comprehend someone?s explanation, make a mental calculation, make a decision or execute a plan you have to hold information into a ?mental workspace? long enough to integrate and process it. And you need to selectively attend to what is important and what is merely distracting to perform the task at hand.

A child uses WM when doing math calculations, listening to a story or making something (Figure 2). She has to hold onto the numbers while working with them, she needs to remember the sequence of events and also think of what the story is about, and she needs to hold in mind a plan to enact.

There are two theories about how working memory works. Each of them will be described in the following sections.

Baddely & Hitch Model of Working Memory

According to Baddeley?s (2000; Baddely & Hitch, 1974) model of working memory (Figure 3) there are three subsystems for temporary storage and maintenance of information ? the ?visuo-spatial scratchpad?, the ?phonological loop?, and the ?episodic buffer?. There is also a super-system called ?central executive? that controls the flow of information into these other systems, filtering out what is unimportant, allowing for higher order processing of the information through reasoning, decision-making, planning and comprehension. ?

The visuospatial sketchpad is a short term memory store or ?buffer? for just visual and spatial information. Information currently active in this WM store is also linked to our ?visual semantics? in long-term memory. This is what we know about visual and spatial information in the world, such as directions to work or the layout of the rooms in our home. What is in our long-term memory is outside of our WM system, but the contents of our long term memory are activated by information in WM.

The phonological loop is a short term memory store for verbal information. Items in this store have links with of language and concepts in our long-term memory . In the diagram above, the box diagram would be stored in the visuo-spatial buffer, and the names for the different subsystems would be stored in the phonological loop.

While these systems store information in specific modalities, the episodic buffer is a short term store for ?multi-modal? information. It?s job is to ?bind together? information from the other short term buffers -? language information with visuo-spatial information -? into unitary representations called ?episodes? that make sense to us. An example of integrated information that may be held in the episodic buffer is the full diagram of working memory above, where the different names are organized in a visuo-spatial flow diagram.

The central executive is a goal focused system for selecting, controlling and coordinating the information in the three short term buffers for comprehension, problem solving, decision making, etc. It is essentially an attentional control mechanism, allowing us to focus attention on task-relevant information and ignore distractions.

The central executive of WM involves both the pre-frontal cortex and parietal cortex ? in the so-called ?fronto-parietal axis? as shown in Figure 4.

Cowan?s Embedded Process Model of Working Memory

Unlike Baddeley?s model, which is concerned with modularity and components of the working memory, Cowan offered a view oriented mostly on underlying cognitive processes. According to his model, the central executive acts as a selective attentional filter to activate task-relevant representations from long-term memory (Figure 5).

The attentional ?filter? of our central executive is capacity limited, typically processing at any one time around 3-4 items of information from the short term buffers. This is our ?mental workspace?. Another metaphor for WM capacity is a computer?s RAM capacity. A computer?s RAM enables temporary storage and working space for the operating system and applications, The larger the RAM capacity, the more working space it has to process information. The same is true for WM capacity.

WM makes information available for more advanced cognitive processing, WM capacity represents one of the main rate limiting factors for higher-order cognitive functions such as reasoning and decision making. Individuals differ in the size of their WM capacity, and because of this, they differ in their capacity to reason, make decisions, plan and comprehend.

There is also a normal decline in WM capacity with aging, starting around 25-30 years of age, with a decline of about 5-10% per decade.

Working memory capacity ? our mental workspace -? is correlated with a wide range of brain functions ?and Higher Order Cognitive Skills (HOCS) such as:

• Attentional tasks (Fukuda & Vogel, 2009).
• Resistance to being distracted (Fukuda & Vogel, 2011)
• Sustained attention (without mind wandering) during challenging tasks in daily life (McVay & Kane, 2009).
• Reading comprehension (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980)
• Reasoning, problem solving, and fluid intelligence? (Engle et al., 1999; Kane et al. (2005). Fluid intelligence is involved in reasoning and when complex relationships have to be perceived and used to find solutions for new problems.
• Scholastic aptitude (Cowan et al., 2005).
• Academic success (Alloway et al., 2004)
• Language acquisition (Baddeley, 2003).

Skill learning is defined as an improvement in attention, perception, cognition or motor skills as a result of training and that persists for several weeks or months. Brain training is skill learning for cognitive abilities resulting in long-term neuroplasticity changes in the brain?s neural networks underlying those abilities.

We can improve on virtually any cognitive task with practice. But in general the effects of brain training are highly specific: improvement is observed only in the trained task, with little or no transfer of learning to untrained tasks. In a famous example, Ericsson and Chase (1982) showed a student who did cognitive trained for many hours of practice on a short term number memorization task could successfully recall over 80 randomly ordered digits.? But the student was limited to a short term memory of just 7 items when the content to be remembered was not numerical. ?Extensive practice on computer games is known to result in highly specific attention and motor skills ? those needed for better game-performance.

The narrowness (specificity) of the benefits of many classical studies of skill learning have led many to conclude that the benefits of practice on a given task are domain specific ?? enhancing performance only in the trained task and a small set of closely related tasks that involve the same type of material. Domain general capacities underlying wide ranging cognitive abilities ? such as general intelligence or working memory needed for HOCS ? have traditionally been understood as more or less ?hard-wired? by late childhood ? and untrainable.

Many recent studies have now shown that brain training can improve one domain-general ability ? working memory and its capacity. This kind of training has benefits that extend well beyond the training tasks to a wide variety of cognitive abilities and HOCS. The mind?s workspace can be expanded with training, and the effects are long-lasting (review, Chein & Morrison, 2010).

training can effectively expand the central workspace of the mind?core WM training studies seem to produce more far-reaching transfer effects, likely because they target domain-general mechanisms of WM. ?(Chein & Morrison, 2010, p. 233)

The results of individual studies encourage optimism regarding the value of WM training as a tool for general cognitive enhancement. ?Studies of core training show improvements in a variety of areas of cognition (e.g. cognitive control, reading comprehension), persist even with the use of tightly matched controls, and are consistent with neuroimaging studies demonstrating activation changes in regions associated with domain-general cognitive performance. Core WM training thus represents a favourable approach to achieve broad cognitive enhancement. (Morrison & Chein, 2011, p. 34).

there is a rapidly growing number of studies demonstrating that training-related increases in WM capacity can yield improvements in a range of important cognitive skills (Chein & Morrison, 2010) as well as improved cognitive function in clinical populations with known WM deficiencies. (e.g. Kingberg et al., 2005, p. 72)

The most widely studied brain training exercise targeting WM capacity is the N-back task. The N-back task involves viewing a continuous stream of items (e.g., letters) and deciding whether each item matches the stimulus presented n stimuli back. The task exercises a number of executive processes including attentional selection, updating, and multi-tasking. It is also adaptive, increasing in difficulty (the n-back interval) as skill in the task improves, ensuring that task performance doesn?t become automatized. In Dual N-back training, a verbal and a visuo-spatial stream of items is presented simultaneously and item matches have to be detected for both modalities (Figure 6). This dual task requires updating items in both the visuospatial sketchpad and the phonological loop WM buffers described above. It is widely considered to be the most effective type of n-back training.

WM capacity training has been shown in replicated studies to result in the following cognitive benefits (reviews: Morrison & Chein, 2011; Salminen, Strobach & Schubert, 2012):

• Increased performance on untrained measures of short term memory.
• Multi-tasking ? i.e. attentional selection between two sets of information associated with different tasks.
• Detaching attention from irrelevant items and attending to new relevant items.
• Shielding against interfering information.
• Episodic memory.
• Reading comprehension.
• Fluid intelligence (mixed reports).
• Verbal learning and every day attention in older adults (60+).
• Reduced symptoms of ADHD.
• Improvements for multiple sclerosis ? everyday memory, quality of life.
• Improvements for schizophrenia patients ? everyday memory, quality of life.
• Improvements for frontal lobe stroke patients.

WM training results in neuroplasticity changes within a network of brain regions known to underlie the central executive of WM ?- the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex (Smith & Jonides, 1998; Wager & Smith, 2003).

I will conclude this review by considering limitations of WM training methods, that might explain why some results are not consistent in the literature.

1. Engaging the Episodic Buffer: Multi-Modal Information Processing

While the traditional dual n-back task involves the parallel WM attentional processing of both verbal (phonological) and visuo-spatial information, it does not require that the information is integrated in a ?multimodal? code.? There is no requirement for ?binding? of different domains of information ? the function of the Episodic Buffer in Baddeley?s model of WM (Figure 7).

Information-binding for temporary episodic storage puts attentional demands on the central executive, and integrated multi-modal information is critical for much goal-directed cognition.

2. Inhibition of Distractors

Research emphasizes a strong link between WM ?capacity and the ability to resist distractors and irrelevant information (Tsuchida, Katayama & Murohashi, 2012). Individuals with higher working memory capacity have a higher prefrontal activity and are better at filtering out distractors (McNab & Klingberg, 2008).

According to the ?strategic allocation hypothesis? how well irrelevant/distracting information is inhibited determines WM differences in performance (Turley-Ames & Whitfield, 2003).?Work by Gray, Chabris and Braver (2003) shows that the common mechanism underlying the link between WM capacity and fluid intelligence is interference control.?In the traditional dual n-back there is no requirement to actively inhibit responses to items in an irrelevant task modality.

3. Multi-Tasking

Traditional dual n-back training is not found to have a transfer effect to task switching ? the ability to rapidly switch between performing two different tasks. Salminen et al. (2012) found that dual n-back training did not transfer to dual-task coordination (multi-tasking) which required inhibition of one task at the time of response. The reason for these findings may be that task switching and inhibition is not required in the traditional dual n-back.

4. Motivation: Incentives for Program Completion

Improvement in performance is not always due to training-induced learning (Green & Bavelier, 2008). Changes in motivation can lead to differences in performance. One of the problems with the traditional dual n-back and its current variations on the market is that there is a high ?drop out? rate before the training program is complete.

Because of these limitations, the full effectiveness of working memory training may not be exhibited in the literature. They may also explain inconsistencies of results in the literature. Dealing with these problems will be the challenge for working memory training in the future.

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Source: http://cogpsylab.com/a-review-of-working-memory-training/

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