The short answer to that question is ‘yes’.
We have known for some time that training particular cognitive skills, like working memory, can produce improvements in cognition. These improvements transfer to other untrained tasks, provided that they are similarly structured. However, we know very little about how these kinds of intensive cognitive training programmes change children’s performance.
The study has been under embargo whilst it awaits publication in the Journal of Neuroscience, but the embargo has just been lifted, and we can now tell you all about it (the paper itself should be published very soon – open access, naturally). We used magnetoencephalography – a technique for measuring electrical brain activity – to explore patterns of brain activity as children rested in the scanner with their eyes closed. We repeated this procedure before and after the children underwent working memory training. Importantly, only half of the children underwent an intensive version of the training, with the other half doing a low intensity version. This latter group acted as a control, and the children were randomly allocated to the high or low intensity conditions.
After the training, children’s working memory performance improved. We used standardised assessments of working memory to show this. Importantly, these improvements were specific to the group of children who had undertaken the intensive training programme, with the control group showing little or no improvement. This pattern could not have resulted from us expecting that the children in the intensive group ought to show bigger improvements than the controls, because the researcher doing the assessments did not know which group the children were assigned to.
The magnetoencephalography data allowed us to explore whether there were any significant changes in children’s brains, and whether these changes mirrored the improvements in performance that we observed. We used the spontaneous electrical activity in the children’s brains to explore network connectivity – that is, how different brain areas are coordinated. After the training, connectivity within networks involved in attentional control were significantly enhanced. Furthermore, the bigger the change in connectivity, the bigger the improvement in the child’s working memory.
We have a lot more data on these children, which we are slowly crunching our way through. So there will be more to come!
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