Fluid intelligence is important for successful functioning in the modern world, but much evidence suggests that fluid intelligence is largely immutable after childhood. Recently, however, researchers have reported gains in fluid intelligence after multiple sessions of adaptive working memory training in adults. The current study attempted to replicate and expand those results by administering a broad assessment of cognitive abilities and personality traits to young adults who underwent 20 sessions of an adaptive dual n-back working memory training program and comparing their post-training performance on those tests to a matched set of young adults who underwent 20 sessions of an adaptive attentional tracking program. Pre- and post-training measurements of fluid intelligence, standardized intelligence tests, speed of processing, reading skills, and other tests of working memory were assessed. Both training groups exhibited substantial and specific improvements on the trained tasks that persisted for at least 6 months post-training, but no transfer of improvement was observed to any of the non-trained measurements when compared to a third untrained group serving as a passive control. These findings fail to support the idea that adaptive working memory training in healthy young adults enhances working memory capacity in non-trained tasks, fluid intelligence, or other measures of cognitive abilities.

We examined how variation in working memory (WM) capacity due to aging or individual differences among young adults is associated with intrinsic or resting-state anticorrelations, particularly between (1) the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), a component of the default-mode network (DMN) that typically decreases in activation during external, attention-demanding tasks, and (2) the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a component of the fronto-parietal control network that supports executive functions and WM and typically increases in activation during attention-demanding tasks. We compared the magnitudes of MPFC-DLPFC anticorrelations between healthy younger and older participants (Experiment 1) and related the magnitudes of these anticorrelations to individual differences on two behavioral measures of working memory capacity in two independent groups of young adults (Experiments 1 and 2). Relative to younger adults, older adults exhibited reductions in working memory capacity and in MPFC-DLPFC anticorrelations. Within younger adults, greater MPFC-DLPFC anticorrelation at rest correlated with greater working memory capacity. These findings show that variation in MPFC-DLPFC anticorrelations, whether related to aging or to individual differences, may reflect an intrinsic functional brain architecture supportive of working memory capacity.

While reducing the burden of brain disorders remains a top priority of organizations like the World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health, the development of novel, safe and effective treatments for brain disorders has been slow. In this paper, we describe the state of the science for an emerging technology, real time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rtfMRI) neurofeedback, in clinical neurotherapeutics. We review the scientific potential of rtfMRI and outline research strategies to optimize the development and application of rtfMRI neurofeedback as a next generation therapeutic tool. We propose that rtfMRI can be used to address a broad range of clinical problems by improving our understanding of brain–behavior relationships in order to develop more specific and effective interventions for individuals with brain disorders. We focus on the use of rtfMRI neurofeedback as a clinical neurotherapeutic tool to drive plasticity in brain function, cognition, and behavior. Our overall goal is for rtfMRI to advance personalized assessment and intervention approaches to enhance resilience and reduce morbidity by correcting maladaptive patterns of brain function in those with brain disorders.

When people are forced to be isolated from one another, do they crave social interactions in the same way a hungry person craves food? To address this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure neural responses in participants (n=40) evoked by food and social cues after ten hours of mandated fasting or total social isolation. After isolation, people felt lonely and craved social interaction. Midbrain regions showed increased activation to food cues after fasting and to social cues after isolation; these responses were correlated with self-reported craving. Neural patterns in response to food cues when participants were hungry generalized to social cues after isolation. Our results support the intuitive idea that acute isolation causes social craving, similar to hunger.

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The rate of learning or memory formation varies over time for any individual, partly due to moment-to-moment fluctuation of brain state. Functional neuroimaging has revealed the neural correlates of learning and memory, but here we asked if neuroimaging can causally enhance human learning by detection of brain states that reveal when a person is prepared or not prepared to learn. The parahippocampal cortex (PHC) is essential for memory formation for scenes. Here, activation in PHC was monitored in real-time, and scene presentations were triggered when participants entered “good” or “bad” brain states for learning of novel scenes. Subsequent recognition memory was more accurate for scenes presented in “good” than “bad” brain states. These findings show that neuroimaging can identify in real-time brain states that enhance or depress learning and memory formation, and knowledge about such brain states may be useful for accelerating education and training. Further, the use of functional neuroimaging as a causal, rather than correlative, tool to study the human brain may open new insights into the neural basis of human cognition.

Working memory is central to human cognition, and intensive cognitive training has been shown to expand working memory capacity in a given domain. It remains unknown, however, how the neural systems that support working memory are altered through intensive training to enable the expansion of working memory capacity. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure plasticity in activations associated with complex working memory before and after 20 days of training. Healthy young adults were randomly assigned to train on either a dual n-back working memory task or a demanding visuospatial attention task. Training resulted in substantial and task-specific expansion of dual n-back abilities accompanied by changes in the relationship between working memory load and activation. Training differentially affected activations in two large-scale fronto-parietal networks thought to underlie working memory: the executive control network and the dorsal attention network. Activations in both networks linearly scaled with working memory load before training, but training dissociated the role of the two networks and eliminated this relationship in the executive control network. Load-dependent functional connectivity both within and between these two networks increased following training, and the magnitudes of increased connectivity were positively correlated with improvements in task performance. These results provide insight into the adaptive neural systems that underlie large gains in working memory capacity through training.