Psychology Research and Behavior Management (Jan 2020)
The Effect of Visual Working Memory Training Could Transfer Across Stimuli
Abstract
Taiyong Bi, 1 Xiaogang Wang, 2 Hui Kou, 1 Jiang Qiu 2 1Center for Mental Health Research in School of Management, Zunyi Medical University, Guizhou, People’s Republic of China; 2Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (Ministry of Education), Southwest University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Hui KouCenter for Mental Health Research in School of Management, Zunyi Medical University, 6 West Xuefu Road, Zunyi, Guizhou 563000, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail [email protected] Jiang QiuKey Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (Ministry of Education), Southwest University, 2 Tiansheng Road, Beibei, Chongqing 400715, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail [email protected]: Working memory, as a fundamental cognitive ability, has been shown to improve with learning. However, little is known about the learning effect of visual working memory training and its generalization to other stimuli and tasks.Methods: In the present study, we utilized a delayed match-to-sample task to measure the working memory of faces and houses. Subjects were trained ten days on this task and were tested on the same task and a memory span task before and after the training.Results: The results showed that training significantly increased the accuracy of visual working memory. More importantly, such a learning effect could partly transfer to a visual working memory task with different stimuli. However, the learning effect may not transfer to a memory span task.Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate that training might influence the common processing of different stimuli in a visual working memory task.Keywords: training, visual working memory, transfer, face perception
