We have made the strong claim that new routines will only be developed if existing mechanisms and processes are not available to support the training activities. Consistent with this framework, a meta-analysis of WM training studies showed that substantial transfer following WM training is largely restricted to cases in which both the trained and untrained tasks share the same complex WM paradigm (Gathercole et al., 2019). Transfer will only occur if the routine can be successfully applied to a new task, and this will only happen if the task demands are closely matched. With practice, the routine becomes more efficient and less demanding of general cognitive resources, and performance improves. Learning a new routine follows the usual course of the acquisition of any cognitive skill (Anderson, 1982 Taatgen, 2013). The suggestion is that to accomplish the unfamiliar tasks present in most WM training programs, trainees must develop novel routines that coordinate the cognitive processes required. To explain this restricted pattern of transfer we have proposed that training on complex WM tasks involves acquiring a new cognitive skill (Gathercole, Dunning, Holmes, & Norris, 2019). However, there is little far transfer to different activities that are also associated with WM, such as attentional control, reasoning, and learning (Cortese et al., 2015 Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2013, 2016 Simons et al., 2016). After more than a decade of research in this field, the consensus is that this kind of training generates reliable near transfer to untrained WM tasks with similar task demands. In these programs, the difficulty of the training task adapts as performance improves with practice.
#HYPOTHESIS OF A DIGIT SPAN MEMORY TEST UPDATE#
For example, participants may be required to engage in distractor activities interpolated between the presentation of memory items (Chein & Morrison, 2010) or to continuously update the sequence of memory items to be remembered (Dahlin, Neely, Larsson, Backman, & Nyberg, 2008 Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, & Perrig, 2008).
#HYPOTHESIS OF A DIGIT SPAN MEMORY TEST SERIAL#
In recent years there has been strong interest in the potential of cognitive training programs to enhance mental capacity (Bavelier, Green, Pouget, & Schrater, 2012 Simons et al., 2016) Many training programs employ complex working memory (WM) activities that combine serial recall of memory sequences with other processing demands. In this study, we asked whether the capacity of short-term memory (STM) can be improved with practice. In contrast, serial recall of digits is fully supported by the existing verbal short-term memory system and does not require the development of new routines. We suggest that training only generates substantial transfer when the unfamiliar demands of the training activities require the development of novel routines that can then be applied to untrained versions of the same paradigm (Gathercole, Dunning, Holmes, & Norris, 2019). In contrast, training on a nonserial visual short-term memory color change detection task did transfer to a line orientation change detection task. Serial recall of visually presented digits was found to improve over the course of 20 training sessions, but this improvement did not extend to recall of either spoken digits or visually presented letters. Here we investigated this with adaptive training algorithms widely applied in working memory training. Is the capacity of short-term memory fixed, or does it improve with practice? It is already known that training on complex working memory tasks is more likely to transfer to untrained tasks with similar properties, but this approach has not been extended to the more basic short-term memory system responsible for verbal serial recall.
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