Who Benefits the Most? Individual Differences in the Transfer of Executive Control Training Across the Lifespan

Abstract

Training studies have shown that cognitive plasticity, that is the potential modifiability of a person's cognitive abilities, is considerable across the lifespan and extends to very old age. Cognitive training can not only result in significant performance improvements on the trained tasks, but also benefit performance on new untrained tasks (transfer). However, even though interventions can be very successful at the group level, individual differences in training gains tend to be large. Why do some individuals benefit more than others? In the present study (N = 168), we investigated transfer of executive control training in children (N = 56, 8-10 years of age), younger adults (N = 56, 18-28 years of age), and older adults (N = 56, 62-77 years of age) in a pretest-trainingposttest design. Results of latent change modeling showed a training-induced reduction of age differences and individual differences across training and transfer tasks in all age groups. Moreover, individuals with lower cognitive abilities at pretest showed larger training and transfer benefits after the training. This effect was significantly higher in the training group compared to an active control group, indicating that it was based on the executive control training and not on non-focal effects (e.g., regression to the mean). These findings reveal a pattern of compensation effects with the largest training-induced improvements in participants who needed them the most.

Editorial Special Topic: Enhancing Brain and Cognition Through Cognitive Training

“…increases in alpha power) as compared to complex span training or a control intervention. Interestingly, and similar to Karbach et al, 2017, they found that individuals with lower working memory performance at baseline seem to benefit more from training than high-performing individuals. However, there was no indication for far transfer to matrix reasoning.…”

“…Interestingly, while some papers in this Special Topic (e.g., Blacker et al, 2017; Karbach et al, 2017) find that training interventions are most beneficial for those with lower baseline abilities, other papers (e.g. Guye et al, 2017, Strobach & Huestegge, 2017) find the opposite.…”

“…Karbach, Könen, and Spengler (2017) administered a task-switching intervention in three populations, namely, children, young and older adults. Their data demonstrated that training those specific executive functions skills led to a reduction of age-differences, and furthermore, they observed that baseline abilities predicted both, training and transfer gains.…”

The malleability of executive function in early childhood: Effects of schooling and targeted training

“…Another caveat that might have contributed to the relatively small effects is that our population consisted of typically developing children from predominantly privileged backgrounds, and thus, our results might have been affected by restricted range issues. There is evidence that participants with lower baseline ability levels typically improve more in training and transfer than their high‐ability peers (e.g., Jaeggi, Karbach, & Strobach, ; Jaeggi et al., ; Karbach, Könen, & Spengler, ), and furthermore, children from low SES backgrounds seem to show especially large improvements in EF after targeted training, presumably since they are at a higher risk of having deficits in those areas, and consequentially, they have more room to improve (Blair & Raver, ; Segretin et al., ). Due to time restrictions with testing, it is important to note that we only implemented one test per cognitive domain and thus, we are not able to determine whether any improvements would hold on a latent level, that is, whether our results would extend beyond those specific tasks that we used here.…”

Editorial: One Year of Journal of Cognitive Enhancement

“…The data showed that the degree to which participants improved their understanding of themselves predicted their improvements in understanding others' mental states. Third, the articles by Blacker et al (2017) and Karbach et al (2017) highlight that the search for effective cognitive interventions will not benefit from Bone-size-fits-all^approaches, and that we need tailored interventions in order to maximize the training outcomes. As pointed out by Jaeggi et al (2017), the question in the field of cognitive training really should be Bwhat type of training is best for whom?^.…”