Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of “Far Transfer”: Evidence from a Meta-Analytic Review
By M. Melby‐Lervåg, Thomas S. Redick, Charles Hulme. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016
767 citations recorded by the source corpus.
It has been claimed that working memory training programs produce diverse beneficial effects. This article presents a meta-analysis of working memory training studies (with a pretest-posttest design and a control group) that have examined transfer to other measures (nonverbal ability, verbal ability, word decoding, reading comprehension, or arithmetic; 87 publications with 145 experimental comparisons). Immediately following training there were reliable improvements on measures of intermediate transfer (verbal and visuospatial working memory). For measures of far transfer (nonverbal ability, verbal ability, word decoding, reading comprehension, arithmetic) there was no convincing evidence of any reliable improvements when working memory training was compared with a treated control condition. Furthermore, mediation analyses indicated that across studies, the degree of improvement on working memory measures was not related to the magnitude of far-transfer effects found. Finally, analysis of publication bias shows that there is no evidential value from the studies of working memory training using treated controls. The authors conclude that working memory training programs appear to produce short-term, specific training effects that do not generalize to measures of “real-world” cognitive skills. These results seriously question the practical and theoretical importance of current computerized working memory programs as methods of training working memory skills.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57a161286f16efa63b0704de7a0a219ef8c9a24b
Citations in the corpus
- Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert (2018, unknown): “pdf Moats, L. C. (2010). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers.”
- To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses (2018, unknown): “Therefore, except when a study reported a significant pretest difference, we use the standardized mean difference posttreatment scores, which could cause a bias in the effect sizes (see e.g., Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016).”
- Brain volume and intelligence: The moderating role of intelligence measurement quality (2017, unknown): “Thus, Pietschnig et al. (2015) reported an effect notably smaller than the meta-analytic estimates reported by McDaniel (2005; r = .”
- Executive Function: Implications for Education. NCER 2017-2000. (2016, unknown): “Evidence supporting the generalizability of gains in EF skills to academic achievement and other positive life outcomes, however, is mixed at best (Melby-Lervag, Redick, and Hulme 2016).”
- Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work? (2016, unknown): “The analysis considered 145 experimental comparisons drawn from 87 publications (Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016).”