WMP Lab Meeting: Presentation by Anja Pahor

Working Memory and Plasticity Lab Meeting
Thursday, October 18, 2018
11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Education 3216

Topic: "Getting at Underlying Mechanisms of Far Transfer - the Mediating Role of Near Transfer" 
​Presented by Anja Pahor, UCR Post-doctoral Collaborator

Abstract

There have been discrepant findings on the extent to which working memory training results in far transfer. Here we go beyond merely examining the effects of N-back training on matrix reasoning, but instead attempt to understand how these effects occur in the first place. Mediation models were used to test the hypothesis that active training groups would improve on matrix reasoning (far transfer) compared to passive groups and that this effect would be mediated by post-test performance on an untrained working memory task (near transfer). Using two independent samples of healthy adults, we show that the mechanism that underlies far transfer is improvement on near transfer as measured by untrained N-back tasks.