Working Memory Training for Older Participants: A Control Group Training Regimen and Initial Intellectual Functioning Assessment

Summary

A cognitive training intervention in elderly population together with the assessment of the pre training cognitive abilities is presented. We show two versions of training - experimental and active control - and demonstrate their effects on the array of cognitive tests.

Abstract

The efficacy of cognitive training interventions is recently highly debated. There is no consensus on what kind of training regimen is the most effective. Also, individual characteristics as predictors of training outcome are still being investigated. In this article, we show the attempt to address this issue by examining not only the impact of working memory (WM) training on cognitive effectiveness in older adults but also the influence of the initial WM capacity (WMC) on the training's outcome. We describe in detail how to perform 5 weeks of an adaptive dual n-back training with an active control group (memory quiz). We are focusing here on technical aspects of the training as well as on the initial assessment of participants' WMC. The evaluation of pre and post training performance of other cognitive dimensions was based on the results of tests of memory updating, inhibition, attention shifting, short-term memory (STM) and reasoning. We have found that the initial level of WMC predicts the efficiency of the n-back training intervention. We have also noticed the post training improvement in almost all aspects of cognitive functioning we measured, but those effects were mostly intervention independent.

Introduction

In many cognitive trainings studies, the dual n-back task is used as a method of working memory (WM) training. WM is a common target of cognitive interventions because of its importance for other, higher level intellectual functions¹. However, the effectiveness of such training and its potential for creating a more general improvement in cognition, has been highly debated (for meta-analysis, see^{2,3,4,5,6,7,14} and f....

Protocol

The SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities Ethics Committee assessed the protocol described here. A written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki was obtained from every participant.

1. Participants recruitment

1. Recruit at least 36 volunteers for each training group. This number was evidenced to be enough to observe between-groups effects by authors' previous research and also in the literature on the subject. Typical effect sizes in working .......

Discussion

In the study presented here, we have investigated whether older adults could benefit from working memory training and if it is connected to the initial level of their basic cognition. We used an n-back task as an experimental intervention and working memory capacity (measured with the OSPAN task) was the method to probe participants' initial level of intellectual functioning. We had two critical steps in the protocol. The first and most important was the assessment of the initial WM level. The second was the careful .......

Materials

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
GEx	n/a	authorial online platform: used for N-back training, Quiz
IBM SPSS Statistics 26.0	IBM Corporation	SPSS software was used to compute statistical analysis.
Inquisit version 4.0.8.0	Millisecond Software	software: tool for designing and administering experiments used for: The Sternberg Task, The Linear Syllogism Task and presenting the instructions for baseline EEG recording
MATLAB R2018b	The MathWorks, Inc	MATLAB software was used to compute statistics and to export databases and  visualisation of the results
PsychoPy version 2 v.1.83.04	Jonathan Peirce; supported by University of Nottingham	open-source software used for: Go/no Go Task, The Switching Task, Running Memory Span Taskckage based on Python
Sublime Text (version 2.0.2)	n/a	open-source software: HTML editor used for: online OSPAN Task