Malinovitch, T. 1 , Albouy, P. 2, 3 , Zatorre, R. 2, 3 & Ahissar, M. 1
1 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
2 Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
3 International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), Montreal, Canada
Previous studies have found that training on a specific working memory (WM) task results in improvement - task-specific or more general. We asked what are the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying training-induced improvement, and whether it can truly transfer to other tasks. We trained a group of participants in a novel demanding WM task, and an active control group in a complex perceptual task.
Following 40 training sessions, most participants showed major improvement in the trained WM task, but no transfer to other tasks. Successful learners developed a task-specific strategy based on the unique statistical features of the task and the stimuli, even though stimuli were selected randomly and had no pre-planned regularity. By contrast, poor learners continued to rely on a naive WM-based strategy. Correspondingly, fMRI scans revealed a shift in activations following successful training: from WM-related fronto-parietal brain regions to temporal regions associated with domain specific auditory processing.
We propose a novel explanation for the vast improvement found in previous studies that trained participants on different WM tasks: during training, efficient learners extract and use, often implicitly, the specific statistical regularities that are informative for the task, rather than increase their WM capacity, as previously claimed.