Does Strategy Training Reduce Age-Related Deficits in Working Memory?

Abstract

Background: Older adults typically perform worse on measures of working memory (WM) than do young adults; however, age-related differences in WM performance might be reduced if older adults use effective encoding strategies. Objective: The purpose of the current experiment was to evaluate WM performance after training individuals to use effective encoding strategies. Methods: Participants in the training group (older adults: n = 39; young adults: n = 41) were taught about various verbal encoding strategies and their differential effectiveness and were trained to use interactive imagery and sentence generation on a list-learning task. Participants in the control group (older: n = 37; young: n = 38) completed an equally engaging filler task. All participants completed a pre- and post-training reading span task, which included self-reported strategy use, as well as two transfer tasks that differed in the affordance to use the trained strategies - a paired-associate recall task and the self-ordered pointing task. Results: Both young and older adults were able to use the target strategies on the WM task and showed gains in WM performance after training. The age-related WM deficit was not greatly affected, however, and the training gains did not transfer to the other cognitive tasks. In fact, participants attempted to adapt the trained strategies for a paired-associate recall task, but the increased strategy use did not benefit their performance. Conclusions: Strategy training can boost WM performance, and its benefits appear to arise from strategy-specific effects and not from domain-general gains in cognitive ability.

Multimodal coding and strategic approach in young and older adults’ visual working memory performance

“…Given the observed age-related inefficiency in strategic approach, a natural question stemming from the present research is whether or not older adults' working memory performance could be enhanced through strategy training (e.g. Bailey et al, 2014;Logie, 2012). This seems possible, particularly if the training included emphasizing the efficient as well as the inefficient strategies, so that efficient ones are preferable from the outset of the task.…”

Does articulatory rehearsal help immediate serial recall?

“…One possible explanation of this effect is that people use elaborative rehearsal: It is possible that the long inter-item interval favored the use of elaboration or imagery. Self-report studies (Bailey et al, 2009(Bailey et al, , 2014(Bailey et al, , 2008 suggest that elaboration is a more effective maintenance strategy than rehearsal. Here we found tentative evidence for the elaboration explanation in Experiments 1 and 3: The benefit of slower presentation rate was more pronounced for concrete, highly imageable words that are relatively easy to elaborate compared to abstract, low imageable words.…”

The effects of memory training on behavioral and microstructural plasticity in young and older adults

“…As the focus of this study was to investigate the relationships between training gain and WM microstructure, transfer effects in terms of improvement on untrained tasks were not assessed. Although the evidence for transfer effects after strategy training is limited [Bailey et al, ; Ball et al, ; Derwinger et al, ; Jones et al, ; Neely and Bäckman, ], some studies have reported improvement on untrained tasks in both young and older adults after strategy training [Carretti et al, ; Cavallini et al, ; Vranić et al, ] and episodic memory training [Schmiedek et al, ]. One study showed larger transfer from strategy training when instructions about applicability were provided [Cavallini et al, ].…”