Why the study?
Does working memory training with an adaptive auditory-visuospatial dual n-back task improve near transfer effects in healthy young adults?
Does working memory training with an adaptive auditory-visuospatial dual n-back task improve near transfer effects in healthy young adults?
Working memory training with a dual n-back task in healthy young adults yields task-specific transfer and improvements in WM updating, but does not broadly transfer to Active or Passive WM composites.
Limited near transfer from dual n-back training warrants targeted use only; challenges broad WM enhancement claims.
In a randomized controlled trial, we investigated the pattern of near transfer effects of working memory (WM) training with an adaptive auditory-visuospatial dual n-back training task in healthy young adults. The results revealed significant task-specific transfer to an untrained single n-back task, and more general near transfer to a WM updating composite score plus a nearly significant effect on a composite score measuring interference control in WM. No transfer effects were seen on Active or Passive WM composites. The results are discussed in the light of cognitive versus strategy-related overlap between training and transfer tasks.
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Soveri et al. (2017) studied this question.
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