Notre Dame Pro­fes­sor Bradley Gib­son, whom we inter­viewed a few months ago (see below) pre­sented the results from his study recently at the Soci­ety for Research in Child Devel­op­ment (SRCD):

Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame Pro­fes­sor and Research Team are First in U.S. to Val­i­date Break­through Study on the Effec­tive­ness of Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing in Improv­ing Atten­tion Deficits in Chil­dren (pdf)

• “Dr. Bradley Gib­son, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame, and his col­leagues (Gib­son, Seroczyn­ski, Gon­doli, Braungart-Rieker, & Grundy, 2007)  will share new find­ings from the first U.S. study on the effec­tive­ness of Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing for improv­ing atten­tion abil­i­ties in chil­dren with ADHD. The study val­i­dates pre­vi­ous research from Sweden’s Karolin­ska Insti­tute which revealed a fun­da­men­tal break­through in the way atten­tion prob­lems are proac­tively treated. Gib­son will unveil the results of the U.S. study dur­ing the Soci­ety for Research in Child Devel­op­ment (SRCD) bi-annual con­fer­ence in Boston. Cogmed is a pio­neer in neu­rotech­nol­ogy and a devel­oper of software-based work­ing mem­ory train­ing products.”

Our inter­view with Notre Dame’s Bradley Gibson

• AF: Tell us about ADD/ ADHD and devel­op­ment tra­jec­to­ries.
• BG: There is a very insight­ful study by Wal­ter Mis­chel on pre-schoolers aged 4 and 5. Some of them had a bet­ter abil­ity to con­trol their atten­tion and delay grat­i­fi­ca­tion (mea­sured as the capac­ity not to imme­di­ately eat a marsh­mal­low but to wait for a larger pos­te­rior reward), and those kids were shown, 14 years later, to be hap­pier, have bet­ter over­all school grades, score around 200 points higher in the SAT, and, when tested, dis­play bet­ter exec­u­tive func­tion­ing over­all. The study showed that there are indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences at very young ages-and the impor­tant impli­ca­tions from this fact. Now, the part that I con­sider more excit­ing is that these dif­fer­ences are not fixed. Train­ing is very important

You can learn more about Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing and RoboMemo.

Other inter­views in our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series:

You can meet the Cogmed team by attend­ing our panel on Brain Fit­ness at Neu­rotech Indus­try Con­fer­ence, May 17th in San Francisco.

Be Socia­ble, Share!

•