Does strategy training reduce age-related deficits in working memory?

Background: Older adults typically perform worse on measures of working memory (WM) than do young adults; however, age-related differences in WM performance might be reduced if older adults use effective encoding strategies.

Objective: The purpose of the current experiment was to evaluate WM performance after training individuals to use effective encoding strategies.

Methods: Participants in the training group (older adults: n = 39; young adults: n = 41) were taught about various verbal encoding strategies and their differential effectiveness and were trained to use interactive imagery and sentence generation on a list-learning task. Participants in the control group (older: n = 37; young: n = 38) completed an equally engaging filler task. All participants completed a pre- and post-training reading span task, which included self-reported strategy use, as well as two transfer tasks that differed in the affordance to use the trained strategies - a paired-associate recall task and the self-ordered pointing task.

Results: Both young and older adults were able to use the target strategies on the WM task and showed gains in WM performance after training. The age-related WM deficit was not greatly affected, however, and the training gains did not transfer to the other cognitive tasks. In fact, participants attempted to adapt the trained strategies for a paired-associate recall task, but the increased strategy use did not benefit their performance.

Conclusions: Strategy training can boost WM performance, and its benefits appear to arise from strategy-specific effects and not from domain-general gains in cognitive ability.