ABSTRACT

Cognitive (brain) training can be defined as targeted interventions meant to improve specific mental capacities or abilities through repeated practice. By and large, researchers have focused on working memory (WM) training. WM can be defined as “a multicomponent system for active maintenance of information in the face of ongoing processing and/or distraction” (Conway et al., 2005, p. 770). We now know that WM capacity is correlated positively with performance in a number of domains central to higher cognition including reasoning (De Neys, 2006), creative problem solving (De Dreu et al., 2012), and decision making (see Baddeley, 2003). Its ubiquity in human thought processes makes the current focus on training WM understandable. In essence, WM training offers the tantalizing prospect of improving a single domain-general capacity that can in turn contribute to better performance in multiple specific domains.