Think! Evidence

Cognitive neuroscience of training and transfer in working memory and visual attention

Show simple item record

dc.contributor John D. E. Gabreli.
dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
dc.creator Thompson, Todd Wesley
dc.date 2015-07-17T19:46:26Z
dc.date 2015-07-17T19:46:26Z
dc.date 2015
dc.date 2015
dc.identifier http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97787
dc.identifier 911649747
dc.description Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2015.
dc.description Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
dc.description Includes bibliographical references (pages 133-142).
dc.description The trained enhancement of working memory and visual attention has both theoretical implications for understanding the architectures of cognition, as well as practical implications for education and clinical treatment. In particular, transfer of training from one task to another may reveal shared psychological processes or neural systems across domains of cognition. In three experiments presented here, participants underwent a month of intensive training on either a complex working memory task or a visual attention task. Although participants made substantial gains on the trained tasks, that training did not yield transfer to untrained tasks measuring fluid intelligence, reading comprehension, or processing speed (Experiment 1). Brain imaging conducted before and after training revealed that increased working memory performance was accompanied by decreases of functional activation within anatomically circumscribed regions of frontal and parietal cortex as well as more wide-spread increases in frontoparietal functional connectivity (Experiment 2). Visual attention training using adaptively adjusted speeds on a multiple object tracking task revealed sizeable gains on the task itself, and those gains enabled the tracking of an increased number of items at a constant speed. This transfer from speed to quantity suggests that a common process underlies tracking speed and tracking capacity in visual attention (Experiment 3).
dc.description by Todd Wesley Thompson.
dc.description Ph. D.
dc.format 142 pages
dc.format application/pdf
dc.language eng
dc.publisher Massachusetts Institute of Technology
dc.rights M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
dc.rights http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
dc.subject Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
dc.title Cognitive neuroscience of training and transfer in working memory and visual attention
dc.type Thesis


Files in this item

Files Size Format View
911649747-MIT.pdf 11.80Mb application/pdf View/Open

Files in this item

Files Size Format View
911649747-MIT.pdf 11.80Mb application/pdf View/Open

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record

Search Think! Evidence


Browse

My Account