Am get­ting ready for CHADD con­fer­ence in Chicago later this week. Will get to meet the Cogmed team, includ­ing Dr. Torkel Kling­berg, com­ing from Swe­den for the ocassion.

A num­ber of peo­ple have asked me for some pre­lim­i­nary infor­ma­tion from the repli­ca­tion stud­ies done based on Cogmed’s Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing Pro­gram. Here you have a cou­ple of uni­veristy arti­cles (peer-reviewed jour­nal papers take longer to appear):

- University’s of Notre Dame’s New ADHD inter­ven­tion yields promis­ing results: “ADHD is thought to be an impair­ment of the brain’s exec­u­tive func­tion­ing, pos­si­bly the work­ing mem­ory,” Gib­son says. “For peo­ple with ADHD, the abil­ity to hold infor­ma­tion tem­porar­ily in mind is espe­cially vul­ner­a­ble to dis­trac­tion. So orga­niz­ing behav­ior across time–like remem­ber­ing the series of things to do in order to get ready in the morning–requires the abil­ity to sup­press dis­trac­tion, and kids with ADHD have trou­ble with that.”. “After this train­ing, the major­ity of stu­dents did report improve­ments in behav­ior and symp­toms of their ADHD, are doing more and can han­dle more. Their par­ents also noticed changes and improvements.”

“Gib­son reports that areas like read­ing com­pre­hen­sion also improved, allow­ing stu­dents to work at higher lev­els and main­tain their new-found abilities.”

- Stan­ford University’s RoboMemo remo­bi­lizes work­ing mem­ory: “Com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing effec­tively improved reg­u­lar stu­dents’ short-term mem­ory and abil­ity to con­trol cog­ni­tive tasks in a school set­ting,” Yuan says. “Fur­ther stud­ies are war­ranted to exam­ine the training’s impact on stu­dents’ fluid intel­li­gence and sci­ence achievement.”

In short: good results for kids with ADD/ ADHD, which has been the core focus of the research and pro­gram so far. More research is needed to assess the ben­e­fits for everyone’s sci­ence (and math) skills.

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