Can unpredictable memory training boost mental flexibility in seniors?
Older adults who practiced a working memory task with unpredictable target shifts showed better transfer to untrained episodic memory skills than those who practiced with predictable patterns.
Source
To Switch or Not to Switch: Role of Cognitive Control in Working Memory Training in Older Adults
Study at a glance
- Design
- RCT — Double-blind randomized training of switching vs non-switching paradigms over five sessions in older adults
- N
- N=43 · 46 recruited ages 60–86; 3 withdrew; 29 women
- Population
- Right-handed older adults with at least high-school education and controlled blood pressure
- Outcome
- Task-switching RT after switch-specific vs non-switch cognitive training
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Inspect source passages
Can unpredictable memory training boost mental flexibility in seniors?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
Forty-three participants analyzed in the study
Forty-three participants were used in the analyses ( M age = 68.81, SD age = 5.18, M education = 15.05, SD education = 2.54), because three participants withdrew from the experiment due to personal reasons (e.g., health).
Five daily training sessions
Participants were trained on the respective paradigms over five 1 h training days spanning across 2 weeks, such that 1 week had two sessions and the other week had three sessions.
What they did
Researchers randomly assigned forty-three older adults to either a predictable or unpredictable version of a working memory training program. The training occurred over five daily sessions across 2 weeks. The researchers evaluated participants on untrained tasks like story recall and abstract reasoning immediately after training and again after a 1.5 month retention period.
What they found
Immediately after training, the unpredictable training group showed greater improvements in a story recall task compared to the predictable group, yielding a medium effect. Individual learning rates on the training task predicted these cognitive gains. However, these improvements did not persist during the delayed testing session.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study did not include a passive or active control group outside of the training conditions, meaning general practice or expectation effects cannot be completely ruled out. Additionally, the sample size was relatively small with forty-three participants analyzed, which limits the power to detect smaller cognitive changes. Finally, the training benefits did not endure to the delayed follow-up, indicating that five days of training is insufficient for long-term cognitive maintenance.
Key terms
- Focus of Attention
- A highly accessible portion of working memory that holds active information currently being processed.
- Focus Switch Cost
- The increase in response time that occurs when shifting attention from one memory item to another.
- Predictable Training
- Memory training where the order of items to update follows a fixed, expected pattern.
- Unpredictable Training
- Memory training where items to update are presented in a random, unexpected order.
- Episodic Memory
- The ability to recall personally experienced events, such as details of a story.
- Fluid Cognition
- The capacity to think logically, reason, and solve novel problems independent of acquired knowledge.
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Which brain networks are primarily thought to underlie age-related declines in working memory and cognitive control?
Common questions
Why does the unpredictability of the training matter?
Unpredictable patterns require more cognitive control because the brain cannot anticipate which information to update next, forcing active attention and strengthening executive function.
Did the training expand the capacity of the focus of attention?
No, even after training, participants could still only hold one item at a time in their immediate focus of attention, though their efficiency in switching increased.
Why did the researchers focus on story recall as an outcome?
Story recall measures episodic memory, which naturally declines with age and serves as an early marker for cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's disease.
Is this training program commercially available?
No, this was a custom-designed laboratory paradigm called the N-Match task, used specifically to test cognitive theories in a controlled research setting.
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