Benefits in tasks related to everyday life competences after a working memory training in older adults

Abstract

These results suggest that WM training can positively impact cognitive functioning and, more importantly, older adults' abilities in everyday living. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Improving Older Adults’ Working Memory: the Influence of Age and Crystallized Intelligence on Training Outcomes

“…The large training benefit in the working memory training group follows up on earlier findings of studies using the same training regime (Borella et al 2010;Borella et al 2013;Cantarella et al 2017;Carretti et al 2013). Although the training was relatively short with only four training sessions, trained participants still achieved a substantial increase in performance that was not attributable to pure retest effects as seen in the control group, but to actual gains based on the working memory training.…”

“…Therefore, we included the previously used everyday problems test and a naturalistic prospective memory task, where participants had to call back the experimenter at specific times during the day. As both tasks showed promising results in previous studies (Cantarella et al 2017;Rose et al 2015), we expected a benefit for the training group in both tasks compared to the control groups.…”

“…So far, the influence of training outcomes is sparsely investigated and less than a handful studies report transfer effects to everyday life or everyday-like tasks in older adults. The studies found far transfer effects to tasks that mimic everyday problems (e.g., household management; Cantarella et al 2017) or to everyday skills as r e a d i n g c o m p r e h e n s i o n ( C a r r e t t i e t a l . 2 0 1 3 ) .…”

“…We chose a working memory training that has been applied successfully in older adults and that had shown not only training improvements in working memory but also near and far transfer effects to other working memory tasks, fluid intelligence, and executive functions (Borella et al 2010;Cantarella et al 2017;Carretti et al 2013).…”

“…The test was based on the everyday problems test by Willis (1994) and adapted to a Swiss context (for a similar procedure see Cantarella et al 2017 Call-Back Task The call-back task was used to assess prospective memory in a naturalistic setting in everyday life (for a similar procedure see Rose et al 2015). Participants had to call back the experimenter at five different times over the next 2 days.…”