Few studies have examined working memory (WM) training-related gains and their transfer and maintenance effects in older adults. This present research investigates the efficacy of a verbal WM training program in adults aged 65-75 years, considering specific training gains on a verbal WM (criterion) task as well as transfer effects on measures of visuospatial WM, short-term memory, inhibition, processing speed, and fluid intelligence. Maintenance of training benefits was evaluated at 8-month follow-up. Trained older adults showed higher performance than did controls on the criterion task and maintained this benefit after 8 months. Substantial general transfer effects were found for the trained group, but not for the control one. Transfer maintenance gains were found at follow-up, but only for fluid intelligence and processing speed tasks. The results are discussed in terms of cognitive plasticity in older adults.

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Difficulties in inhibitory processes have been shown to characterize the performance of poor comprehenders. However, the inhibitory inefficiency of poor comprehenders is most often assessed by their resistance to proactive interference, that is, the ability to suppress off-goal task information from working memory (WM). In two studies tasks assessing resistance to proactive interference (intrusion errors), response to distracters (Text With Distracters task) and prepotent response inhibition (Stroop and Hayling tests), along with WM measures, were administered to children aged 10 to 11, both good and poor comprehenders. The aim of the study was to specifically determine whether general or specific inhibitory factors affect poor comprehenders' reading difficulties. Results showed that poor comprehenders, compared to good ones, are impaired in WM tasks and in inhibitory tasks that assess resistance to proactive interference. This suggests that reading comprehension difficulties of poor comprehenders are related to specific inhibitory problems.

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BackgroundSeveral studies have found that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks, but this is not always the case, and the strength of this apparent advantage is unknown. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis with the aim of clarifying whether musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks.MethodsEducation Source; PEP (WEB)—Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing; Psychology and Behavioral Science (EBSCO); PsycINFO (Ovid); PubMed; ScienceDirect—AllBooks Content (Elsevier API); SCOPUS (Elsevier API); SocINDEX with Full Text (EBSCO) and Google Scholar were searched for eligible studies. The selected studies involved two groups of participants: young adult musicians and nonmusicians. All the studies included memory tasks (loading long-term, short-term or working memory) that contained tonal, verbal or visuospatial stimuli. Three meta-analyses were run separately for long-term memory, short-term memory and working memory.ResultsWe collected 29 studies, including 53 memory tasks. The results showed that musicians performed better than nonmusicians in terms of long-term memory, g = .29, 95% CI (.08–.51), short-term memory, g = .57, 95% CI (.41–.73), and working memory, g = .56, 95% CI (.33–.80). To further explore the data, we included a moderator (the type of stimulus presented, i.e., tonal, verbal or visuospatial), which was found to influence the effect size for short-term and working memory, but not for long-term memory. In terms of short-term and working memory, the musicians’ advantage was large with tonal stimuli, moderate with verbal stimuli, and small or null with visuospatial stimuli.ConclusionsThe three meta-analyses revealed a small effect size for long-term memory, and a medium effect size for short-term and working memory, suggesting that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks. Moreover, the effect of the moderator suggested that, the type of stimuli influences this advantage.

The paper examines the effect of strategic training on the performance of younger and older adults in an immediate list-recall and a working memory task. The experimental groups of younger and older adults received three sessions of memory training, teaching the use of mental images to improve the memorization of word lists. In contrast, the control groups were not instructed to use any particular strategy, but they were requested to carry out the memory exercises. The results showed that strategic training improved performance of both the younger and older experimental groups in the immediate list recall and in the working memory task. Of particular interest, the improvement in working memory performance of the older experimental group was comparable to that of the younger experimental group.

The present study examined the efficacy of a verbal working memory (WM) training program in old-old individuals (over 75 years of age). Thirty-six adults aged 75-87 took part in the study: 18 were randomly assigned to receive training and the remainder served as active controls. Specific training gains in a verbal WM task (criterion task), and transfer effects on measures of visuospatial WM, short-term memory, inhibition, processing speed, and fluid intelligence were examined. The trained old-old adults performed better than the controls in the criterion task, and this benefit persisted after 8 months; they also showed an increase in the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms at follow-up compared with pretest. The results of this study suggest that the present WM training program produces benefits maintained over time even in old-old adults. These findings confirm that there is still room for plasticity in the basic mechanisms of cognition in advance old age.