Article 5

Training Working Memory: Why and

How

Make your working memory work for you.

by William Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D., is a Professor of Neuroscience at

Texas A&M University.

Psychology Today, March 26, 2012

Working memory refers to the memory you can consciously hold in your

mind at any one instant—such as a phone number you just looked up. Most

people can only hold about four totally independent items in their working

memory.

Working memory relates to intelligence. The reason is that thinking

involves streaming into the brain's "thought engine" chunks of information

held in working memory. The working memory streams in, much like a

Web video streams into your computer. The more you can hold in working

memory, the more information the brain has to think with—that is, the

smarter it can be.

IQ is not fixed. It improves dramatically in the early school years in all

children. Moreover, a recent study shows that both verbal and non-verbal

IQ can change (for better or worse) in teenagers.

Educators have known for some time that it is possible to train ADHD

children to have better working memories, and in the process improve their

school performance. The idea that working memory capacity might be

expanded by training normal children has not yet caught on. Test-driven

teaching in U.S. schools teaches students what to learn, not how to learn.

Researchers in Japan recently tested whether a simple working memory

training method could increase the working memory capacity of children.

While they were at it, they tested for any effect on IQ. Children ages 6-8

were trained 10 minutes a day each day for two months. The training task

to expand working memory capacity consisted of presenting a digit or a

word item for a second, with one-second intervals between items. For

example, a sequence might be 5, 8, 4, 7, with one-second intervals between

each digit. Test for recall could take the form of "Where in the sequence

was the 4?" or "What was the 3rd item?" Thus students had to practice

holding the item sequence in working memory. With practice, the trainers

increased the number of items from 3 to 8.

After training, researchers tested the children on another working memory

task. Scores on this test indicated in all children that working memory

correlated with IQ test scores. When first graders were tested for

intelligence, the data showed that intelligence scores increased during the

year by 6% in controls, but increased by 9% in the group that had been

given the memory training. The memory training effect was even more

evident in the second graders, with a 12% gain in intelligence score in the

memory trained group, compared with a 6% gain in controls. As might be

expected, the lower IQ children showed the greatest gain from memory

training.

I recently found a paper revealing lasting improvements in brain function

were produced in healthy adults by only five weeks of practice on three

working-memory tasks involving the location of objects in space, using a

training program called CogMed. Similar results have been reported by

other investigators.

Another study provides strong evidence that increasing adult working

memory capacity will raise their IQ. Subjects, young adults were trained on

a so-called dual N-back test in which subjects were asked to recall a visual

stimulus that they saw two, three or more stimulus presentations in the past.

As performance improved with each block of trials, the task demands were

increased by shifting from two-back to three, then three to four, etc. Daily

training took about 25 minutes.

The investigators found working memory training improved scores on the

IQ test. Moreover, the effect was dose-dependent, in that intelligence

scores increased in a steady straight-line fashion as the number of training

sessions increased from 8 to 12 to 17 to 19.

Advances in this arena of raising IQ in teenagers and adults may come

faster now that we have some many published reports that working

memory capacity can indeed be expanded by training. The trick is in

finding which approaches work best. Currently, we believe that working

memory can be expanded by attentiveness training, music, and certain

game environments. Actually, I believe demanding education can do the

same thing.

Various techniques are reported in the research literature, and the best

results seem to come from n-back methods. One study by Verhaeghen and

colleagues show that memory span could be increased from one to four

steps back with 10 hours (1 hr/session) of N-back training.

A whole cognitive enhancement industry is flourishing. The idea of brain

fitness software is that playing mentally challenging games will make you

smarter. This is not necessarily true. Several recent reviews suggest that

such games do little. I can only recommend with some certainty those

games that focus on expanding working memory capacity, and even here,

one should not expect too much. I know about three such programs,

MindSparke, Cogmed, and Jungle Memory. I have no personal experience

or financial interest in any of these, but each has the potential to be helpful,

especially in kids or adults with attention deficit.

Training Working Memory Can Be Fun

Biological reward comes from the release of the neurotransmitter,

dopamine. Dopamine release is promoted by performing working memory

tasks, which suggests that working memory tasks are actually rewarding. In

the study of human subjects by Fiona McNab and colleagues in Stockholm,

human males (age 20-28) were trained for 35 minutes per day for five

weeks on working memory tasks with a difficulty level close to their

individual capacity limit. After such training, all subjects showed increased

working memory capacity. Functional MRI scans also showed that the

memory training increased the cerebral cortex density of dopamine D1

receptors, the receptor subtype that mediates feelings of euphoria and

reward.

Some games that are fun to play may also help working memory. The most

obvious example is chess. To play chess well, you have to learn to expand

working memory capacity to hold a plan for several offensive moves while

at the same time holding a memory of how the opponent could respond to

each of the moves. Not surprisingly there are studies showing that IQ

scores can go up after several months of chess playing. Some schools,

especially in minority schools in impoverished neighborhoods have seen

marked improvements in school work by students who joined school chess

clubs.

Students who make good grades feel good about their success. Likewise,

people who are "life-long learners" have discovered learning lots of new

things makes them feel good.