Journal article
Working memory training does not improve performance on measures of intelligence or other measures of “far transfer”
- Abstract:
- It has been claimed that working memory training programs produce diverse beneficial effects. This article presents a meta-analysis of working memory training studies (with a pretest-posttest design and a control group) that have examined transfer to other measures (nonverbal ability, verbal ability, word decoding, reading comprehension, or arithmetic; 87 publications with 145 experimental comparisons). Immediately following training there were reliable improvements on measures of intermediate transfer (verbal and visuospatial working memory). For measures of far transfer (nonverbal ability, verbal ability, word decoding, reading comprehension, arithmetic) there was no convincing evidence of any reliable improvements when working memory training was compared with a treated control condition. Furthermore, mediation analyses indicated that across studies, the degree of improvement on working memory measures was not related to the magnitude of far-transfer effects found. Finally, analysis of publication bias shows that there is no evidential value from the studies of working memory training using treated controls. The authors conclude that working memory training programs appear to produce short-term, specific training effects that do not generalize to measures of “real-world” cognitive skills. These results seriously question the practical and theoretical importance of current computerized working memory programs as methods of training working memory skills.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 671.2KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1177/1745691616635612
Authors
+ National Institutes of Health
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- Funding agency for:
- Redick, T
- Grant:
- 2R01AA013650-11A1
+ Office of Naval Research
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- Funding agency for:
- Redick, T
- Grant:
- 2R01AA013650-11A1
+ Norwegian Research Council
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- Funding agency for:
- Melby-Lervåg, M
- Grant:
- FINNUT
- Publisher:
- Association for Psychological Science
- Journal:
- Perspectives on Psychological Science More from this journal
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 512-534
- Publication date:
- 2016-07-29
- Acceptance date:
- 2016-01-16
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1745-6924
- ISSN:
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1745-6916
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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pubs:675478
- UUID:
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uuid:daa9a729-f17b-4e45-97c0-cff5075ea404
- Local pid:
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pubs:675478
- Source identifiers:
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675478
- Deposit date:
-
2017-04-03
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- © The Author(s) 2016
- Copyright date:
- 2016
- Notes:
- This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
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