Jiang, S., Jones, M. and von Bastian, C.C. orcid.org/0000-0002-0667-2460 (2023) Mechanisms of cognitive change: training improves the quality but not the quantity of visual working memory representations. Journal of Cognition, 6 (1). 42. ISSN 2514-4820
Abstract
As of yet, visual working memory (WM) training has failed to yield consistent cognitive benefits to performance in untrained tasks, despite large improvements in trained tasks. Investigating the mechanisms underlying training effects can help explain these inconsistencies. In this pre-registered, pre-test/post-test online training study, we examined how training affects the quantity and quality of representations in visual WM using continuous-reproduction tasks. N = 64 young healthy adults were randomly assigned to an experimental group or an active control group to complete four training sessions of practce in an orientation-reproduction or a visual search task, respectively. We observed that, in the trained task, only the quality, but not the quantity, of visual WM representations significantly increased in the experimental group relative to the control group. These improvements did not generalise to untrained stimuli or paradigms. Therefore, our findings suggest that training gains are not driven by enhanced capacity. Instead, gains in the quality of visual WM representations that are tied to specific stimuli and paradigms may reflect enhanced efficiency in using the existing visual WM capacity.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | visual work memory; quantity and quality; training mechanism; capacity and efficiency |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Psychology (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ECONOMIC & SOCIAL RESEARCH COUNCIL ES/V013610/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 13 Jul 2023 11:19 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jul 2023 13:12 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Ubiquity Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.5334/joc.306 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:201500 |