A very promis­ing cog­ni­tive train­ing study was pre­sented last week by Helena West­er­berg at the annual meet­ing of the CNS: Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Soci­ety held in San Fran­cisco, and Dr. David Rabiner brings us the highlights.

- Alvaro

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The study was con­ducted with a gen­eral adult pop­u­la­tion, rather than adults diag­nosed with ADHD, as was the case in pre­vi­ous pub­lished work­ing mem­ory train­ing studies,

The study was a ran­dom­ized, con­trolled trial of work­ing mem­ory train­ing con­ducted with 55 younger (20–30 years old) and 45 older (60–70 years old) adults. Par­tic­i­pants were ran­domly assigned to receive 5 weeks of active Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing or a placebo train­ing inter­ven­tion. In the active train­ing group, the dif­fi­culty of the work­ing mem­ory train­ing tasks con­tin­u­ally adjusted to match the individual’s per­for­mance. As a result, indi­vid­u­als were con­sis­tently chal­lenged to per­form at their high­est pos­si­ble level. In the placebo train­ing group, the dif­fi­culty level remained con­stant across the train­ing period such that improve­ments in work­ing mem­ory were not expected to occur.

Results indi­cated that active train­ing was asso­ci­ated with sig­nif­i­cant gains in non-trained work­ing mem­ory tasks; par­tic­u­larly note­wor­thy is that par­tic­i­pants who received active train­ing also reported improved atten­tional per­for­mance and cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing in their daily lives. This was true for both younger and older adults. For the most part, these gains were main­tained 3 months after train­ing ended.

The poster pre­sented at the con­fer­ence pro­vides infor­ma­tion on all mea­sures used in the study as well as a graph­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tion of the results. You can view it at www.helpforadd.com/Westerberg.pdf

You will prob­a­bly need to adjust the image size to prop­erly view the poster.

— Dr. David Rabiner is a child clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist and Direc­tor of Under­grad­u­ate Stud­ies in the Depart­ment of Psy­chol­ogy and Neu­ro­science at Duke Uni­ver­sity. His research focuses on var­i­ous issues related to ADHD, the impact of atten­tion prob­lems on aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment, and atten­tion train­ing. He also pub­lishes Atten­tion Research Update, a com­pli­men­tary online newslet­ter that helps par­ents, pro­fes­sion­als, and edu­ca­tors keep up with the lat­est research on ADHD. Cogmed is a major spon­sor of Atten­tion Research Update.

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