AUTHOR=Fellman Daniel , Soveri Anna , Waris Otto , Laine Matti 

TITLE=Training of Verbal Working Memory at Sentence Level Fails to Show Transfer

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Communication

VOLUME=Volume 2 - 2017

YEAR=2017

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2017.00014

DOI=10.3389/fcomm.2017.00014

ISSN=2297-900X

ABSTRACT=During the past decades, working memory (WM) training has attracted considerable research attention, but its transfer to untrained tasks is still controversial. In a randomized controlled trial, we investigated the possible transfer effects of a novel sentence-level WM training regime. Sixty-eight healthy Finnish adults were randomized into either a WM training group or an active control group. The WM training group practiced for four weeks with two adaptive sentence-level WM training tasks, namely a novel sentence-level updating task and a reading span task. The active control group practiced on a quiz task that called for long-term memory but did not load on WM. There were no statistically significant training effects on the pre-post measures of near and far transfer. We suggest that the lack of training effects may reflect the specificity and automaticity of the sentence processing system.