The aim of this review is to illustrate the role of working memory and executive functions for scholastic achievement as an introduction to the question of whether and how working memory and executive control training may improve academic abilities. The review of current research showed limited but converging evidence for positive effects of process-based complex working-memory training on academic abilities, particularly in the domain of reading. These benefits occurred in children suffering from cognitive and academic deficits as well as in healthy students. Transfer of training to mathematical abilities seemed to be very limited and to depend on the training regime and the characteristics of the study sample. A core issue in training research is whether high- or low-achieving children benefit more from cognitive training. Individual differences in terms of training-related benefits suggested that process-based working memory and executive control training often induced compensation effects with larger benefits in low performing individuals. Finally, we discuss the effects of process-based training in relation to other types of interventions aimed at improving academic achievement.

This meta-analysis examines the effects of aging on directed forgetting. A cue to forget is more effective in younger (d = 1.17) than in older adults (d = 0.81). Directed-forgetting effects were larger: (a) with the item method rather than the list method; (b) with longer presentation times; (c) with longer postcue rehearsal times; (d) with single words rather than verbal action phrases as stimuli; (e) with shorter lists; and (f) when recall rather than recognition was tested. Age effects were reliably larger when the item method was used, suggesting that these effects are mainly due to encoding differences.In this paper, we provide a meta-analytic overview of studies of aging and directed forgetting. The term forgetting often has a negative connotation, especially in the context of aging. Forgetting, however, is not always a failure of memory -sometimes forgetting is desirable. Imagine, for instance, that one of your colleagues has recently remarried, and you welcome her husband with the name of the man she just divorced. When performed intentionally, forgetting may prevent outdated information from interfering with the encoding and retrieval of currently relevant information. The experimental paradigm used most often to study intentional forgetting in episodic memory is the directed-forgetting paradigm (for reviews, see Johnson, 1994, andMacLeod, 1998). In the directed-forgetting paradigm, participants are presented with a set of items, some of which are cued to be remembered for a later memory test (these are labelled TBR items) and others that are cued to be forgotten (TBF items). Memory is unexpectedly tested for all items and is usually worse for TBF than TBR items.Directed forgetting has initially received some attention in the field of cognitive aging due to its ties to an inhibition account of age-related changes in memory (Hasher & Zacks, 1988;Hasher, Zacks, & May, 1999;Zacks, Radvansky, & Hasher, 1996;Zacks & Hasher, 1994). The inhibition theory claims that older adults have difficulties in inhibiting the processing of goal-irrelevant information (e.g., TBF-items). There are, however, several inhibitory and noninhibitory explanations of directed forgetting pointing at differences between cueing methods used in a study (Basden, Basden, & Gargano, 1993;Sahakyan & Foster, 2009 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptA cue to forget can be applied either on an item-by-item basis, that is, each word is individually cued as TBF or TBR, or to a whole list or block of items at once. In list-method studies a first list is presented followed by either a cue to forget or a cue to continue remembering this first list while studying a second list (Bjork, 1972;Block, 1971;Elmes, Adams, & Roediger, 1970;Muther, 1965). In item-method studies, the directed-forgetting effect usually refers to a within-subjects comparison; recall of TBF items is lower than recall of TBR items. In listmethod studies the directed-forgetting effect usually refers to a between-subjects comparison; forget-cue participants typically show impaired Li...

Three negative-priming studies were carried out to examine whether this paradigm allows a separation of the effects of aging on access, deletion, and restraint control of inhibition. In each study 24 younger (18 to 35 years old) and 24 older (57 to 82 years old) adults were asked to identify pictures. The results reveal difficulties among older adults in preventing the access of distracting perceptual input into responses; however, the ability to restrain inappropriate answers and the ability to delete once-relevant information are not affected by age.

Many studies suggest that age differences in a variety of cognitive tasks are due to age-related changes in executive control processes. However, not all executive control processes seem to be age-sensitive. Recently, Verhaeghen et al. (2005) described dissociable age effects in an executive control process responsible for the switching of representations between different functional units of working memory. This so called focus-switching process has two components: (1) the switching of representations from an activated part of long-term memory into a region of immediate access (focus of attention) and (2) the maintenance of representations outside the focus of attention. Age-related deficits occurred in maintaining representations outside the focus of attention, but were absent in switching representations into and out of the focus of attention (e.g., Dorbath and Titz, 2011). In the present study we applied a training approach to examine age-related differences in the trainability of maintenance and switching. We investigated 85 younger (age 19–35, M = 24.07, SD = 3.79) and 91 older (age 59–80, M = 66.27, SD = 4.75) adults using a continuous counting task in a pretest–training–posttest design. The participants were assigned to one of four training conditions differing in the demand to switch or to maintain. The results suggest the influence of training in both components of focus-switching for both, younger and older adults. However, age differences in the amount of training gains were observed. With respect to maintenance the results indicate a compensatory effect of training for older adults who improved their performance to the level of younger adults. With respect to switching, younger adults benefited more from training than older adults. Trainability is thus reduced in older adults with respect to switching, but not for maintenance.

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