Improving Everyday Functioning in the Old-Old with Working Memory Training

Working memory (WM), or the ability to maintain and simultaneously process information for use in a complex task, is a crucial human cognitive mechanism. It is essential to everyday life functioning, but clearly undergoes a linear decline with aging.1 Procedures to improve WM performance, along with any effects on untrained tasks (transfer effects), have thus been the focus of various studies conducted in the last 10years. Although still debated, there is now a body of evidence in the aging literature to support the effectiveness of WM training procedures in producing specific gains in WM tasks similar to those used in the training,2 plus some transfer effects; in the few studies that examined maintenance effects, these benefits also seemed to persist over time.
Source: The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry - Category: Geriatrics Authors: Tags: Regular Research Article Source Type: research