CogMed computerized working-memory training improves practiced working-memory skills with narrow transfer, and controls playing the same games without increasing difficulty show no gains¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · review r2–r3 · q2
Currency · newest study 2011 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Children trained on CogMed improve on games they practice and transfer to other working-memory tasks, but benefits usually do not generalize to unpracticed EF skills. → Diamond Adele 2011 q2 i? Control groups who played the same training games without difficulty increasing did not show the same gains. → Diamond Adele 2011 (2)

Evidence¶

Diamond Adele 2011¶

Diamond Adele, Lee Kathleen. (2011). Interventions shown to Aid Executive Function Development in Children 4–12 Years Old. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1204529

q2 · i? · review · r3

The review reports, citing multiple CogMed studies, that children improve on practiced games with transfer to other working-memory tasks, and that "Benefits usually don’t generalize to unpracticed EF skills."

"Youngsters improve on games they practice and this transfers to other working-memory tasks. Groups studied have been typically-developing children (13), and those with ADHD (11, 14) or poor working-memory spans (10). Benefits usually don’t generalize to unpracticed EF skills."

Diamond Adele 2011 (2)¶

Diamond Adele, Lee Kathleen. (2011). Interventions shown to Aid Executive Function Development in Children 4–12 Years Old. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1204529

q2 · i? · review · r2

The review reports that in three CogMed studies, "controls who played the same training games without difficulty increasing" did not show the same gains, supporting the continual-challenge principle.

"Three studies (10–12) included controls who played the same training games without difficulty increasing; those controls did not show the same gains."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Working Memory — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Computer-based training reliably improves children's working memory and reasoning, but computerized training has not succeeded in improving 4- to 6-year-olds' inhibitory control — reports the opposite
• Transfer from computer-based working-memory and reasoning training in children is narrow: gains stay within the trained domain — a broader claim this one bears on
• EF training demands must keep increasing as children improve, or few gains will be seen — a broader claim this one bears on
• Computerized training of inhibition in young children shows limited success, and a randomized trial found narrow, skill-specific transfer of working-memory and reasoning training in 4-year-olds — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Explicit transfer instructions, in which trainees discuss how trained strategies could apply to a new task, produced reliable transfer of imagery and sentence-generation training to unpracticed text learning in older adults — related
• Isolated EF interventions show robust near-term EF gains but poor transfer, including to early mathematics — a narrower finding that bears on this claim