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Background and aims Narrative-based language intervention provides a naturalistic context for targeting overall story structure and specific syntactic goals in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Given the cognitive demands of narratives, narrative-based language intervention also has the potential to positively impact related abilities such as working memory and academic skills. Methods Ten children (8–11 years old) with DLD completed 15 sessions of narrative-based language intervention. Results Results of single subject data revealed gains in language for five participants, four of whom improved on a probe tapping working memory. An additional four participants improved on a working memory probe only. On standardized measures, clinically significant gains were noted for one additional participant on a language measure and one additional participant on a visuospatial working memory. Carry over to reading was noted for three participants and to math for one participant. Across measures, gains in both verbal and visuospatial working memory were common. A responder analysis revealed that improvement in language may be associated with higher verbal short-term memory and receptive language at baseline. Those with working memory impairments were among those showing the fewest improvements across measures. Conclusions Narrative-based language intervention impacted verbal skills in different ways across individual children with DLD. Implications: Further research is needed to gain an understanding of who benefits most from narrative-based language intervention.

Growth mindset is an important aspect of children’s socioemotional development and is subject to change due to environmental influence. Orchestral music education may function as a fertile context in which to promote growth mindset; however, this education is not widely available to children facing economic hardship. This study examined whether participation in a program of orchestral music education was associated with higher levels of overall growth mindset and greater change in levels of musical growth mindset among children placed at risk by poverty. After at least 2 years of orchestral participation, students reported significantly higher levels of overall growth mindset than their peers; participating students also reported statistically significant increases in musical growth mindset regardless of the number of years that they were enrolled in orchestral music education. These findings have implications for future research into specific pedagogical practices that may promote growth mindset in the context of orchestral music education and more generally for future studies of the extra-musical benefits of high-quality music education.

Impairments in executive functioning are prevalent in chronic pain conditions, with cognitive inflexibility being the most frequently reported. The current randomized, cross-over trial, piloted a computerized cognitive training (CCT) program based on Relational Frame Theory, targeting improvement in cognitive flexibility. At baseline, 73 chronic pain patients completed testing on pre-selected outcomes of executive functioning, alongside IQ measures. When tested three times over the course of 5 months, there was a drop-out rate of 40% at the third time point, leaving 44 patients who had data at all time points. The results showed that there was a substantial learning effect from the MINDFLEX training and a substantial time-dependent improvement on the primary outcomes of increased flexibility, but that this could not be tied to active training. In conclusion, this small study indicated a learning effect as well as improvement on primary outcomes. Based on the current results, a larger trial with improved feasibility of training is warranted. Copyright © 2020 Jacobsen, Klungsøyr, Landrø, Stiles and Roche. This is an openaccess article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

We assessed the transfer effects of training working memory strategies to a novel problem-solving task. Previous WM training studies have produced little evidence for transfer across contexts. In the current study, 64 6- to 9-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of four training conditions: semantic and rehearsal training, semantic training only, rehearsal training only, and treated control group. All training groups performed significantly better on the transfer task than the control group, but training groups did not differ significantly from each other. Implications of the findings for cognitive interventions and future WM training studies are discussed.

One of the most valuable functions of philosophy within the cognitive sciences and education is to help clarify important concepts, and the transfer of learning—particularly far transfer—is one such concept needing extra clarification. This is for two reasons. First, determining the psychological distance of transfer is a subjective matter depending on how similar the base and target are proposed to be which makes labeling instances of far transfer difficult. Second, current theoretical mechanisms of transfer, based on analogical reasoning structure mapping theories, struggle to explain instances of far transfer because of their commitment to structural similarity. This paper addresses these two issues by proposing an additional level of similarity—called thematic similarity—that people may use when engaging in transfer. Based on the philosophical ideas of Stephen Pepper and Gerald Holton, similarity at the thematic level is distinguished from other previously theorized levels of similarity in that it is prefigurative rather than structural. Furthermore, transfer is defined as near or far depending on the type of similarity that is involved in the transfer process rather than according to the total amount of similarity between the target and base. The paper concludes with a discussion regarding the empirical testability of these ideas.

Background: Research on the effects of music education on cognitive abilities has generated increasing interest across the scientific community. Nonetheless, longitudinal studies investigating the effects of structured music education on cognitive sub-functions are still rare. Prime candidates for investigating a relationship between academic achievement and music education appear to be executive functions such as planning, working memory, and inhibition.Methods: One hundred and forty-seven primary school children, Mage = 6.4 years, SD = 0.65 were followed for 2.5 years. Participants were randomized into four groups: two music intervention groups, one active visual arts group, and a no arts control group. Neuropsychological tests assessed verbal intelligence and executive functions. Additionally, a national pupil monitor provided data on academic performance.Results: Children in the visual arts group perform better on visuospatial memory tasks as compared to the three other conditions. However, the test scores on inhibition, planning and verbal intelligence increased significantly in the two music groups over time as compared to the visual art and no arts controls. Mediation analysis with executive functions and verbal IQ as mediator for academic performance have shown a possible far transfer effect from executive sub-function to academic performance scores.Discussion: The present results indicate a positive influence of long-term music education on cognitive abilities such as inhibition and planning. Of note, following a two-and-a-half year long visual arts program significantly improves scores on a visuospatial memory task. All results combined, this study supports a far transfer effect from music education to academic achievement mediated by executive sub-functions.

Butler (2010: Experiment 3) showed that retrieval practice enhanced transfer to a new knowledge domain compared to rereading. The first experiment of the present study was a direct replication of Butler’s third experiment. Participants studied text passages and then either reread them three times or went through three cycles of cued recall questions (i.e., retrieval practice) with feedback. As in Butler’s (2010) experiment, an advantage of retrieval practice on the final far transfer test emerged after 1 week. Additionally, we observed an advantage of retrieval practice on the final test administered after 5 min. However, these advantages might have been due to participants in the retrieval practice condition receiving focused exposure to the key information (i.e., the feedback) that was needed to answer the final test questions. We therefore conducted a second experiment in which we included the retrieval practice condition and the reread condition from our first experiment, as well as a new reread-plus-statements condition. In the reread-plus-statements condition, participants received focused exposure to the key information after they had reread a text. As in Experiment 1, we found a large effect on far transfer when retrieval practice was compared to rereading. However, this effect was substantially reduced when retrieval practice was compared to the reread-plus-statements condition. Taken together, the results of the present experiments demonstrate that Butler’s (2010) testing effect in far transfer is robust. Moreover, focused exposure to key information appears to be a significant factor in this far transfer testing effect.

We investigated transfer of the skills developed by competitive Scrabble players. Previous studies reported superior performance for Scrabble experts on the lexical decision task (LDT), suggesting near transfer of Scrabble skills. Here we investigated the potential for far transfer to a symbol decision task (SDT); in particular, transfer of enhanced long-term working memory for vertically presented stimuli. Our behavioural results showed no evidence for far transfer. Despite years of intensive practice, Scrabble experts were no faster and no more accurate than controls in the SDT. However, our fMRI and EEG data from the SDT suggest that the neural repertoire that Scrabble experts develop supports task performance even outside of the practised domain, in a non-linguistic context. The regions engaged during the SDT were different across groups: controls engaged temporal-frontal regions, whereas Scrabble experts engaged posterior visual and temporal-parietal regions. In Scrabble experts, activity related to Scrabble skill (anagramming scores) included regions associated with visual-spatial processing and long-term working memory, and overlapped with regions previously shown to be associated with Scrabble expertise in the near transfer task (LDT). Analysis of source waveforms within these regions showed that participants with higher anagramming scores had larger P300 amplitudes, potentially reflecting greater working memory capacity, or less variability in the participants who perform the task more efficiently. Thus, the neuroimaging results provide evidence of brain transfer in the absence of behavioural transfer, providing new clues about the consequences of long-term training associated with competitive Scrabble expertise.

The central idea in this chapter is that general cognitive strategies are a by-product of learning specific skills. The PRIMs theory that is based on this idea is capable of making more fine-grained and accurate predictions than the two alternatives: The "brain training is similar to muscle training" idea that overpredicts the effects of cognitive training, and the identical elements theory of transfer that underpredicts it.

Cognitive skills are important predictors of job performance, but the extent to which Computerized Cognitive Training (CCT) can improve job performance in healthy adults is unclear. We report, for the first time, that a CCT program aimed at attention, memory, reasoning and visuo-spatial abilities can enhance productivity in healthy younger adults on bookkeeping tasks with high relevance to real-world job performance. 44 business students (77.3% female, mean age 21.4 ± 2.6 years) were assigned to either (a) 20 hours of CCT, or (b) 20 hours of computerized arithmetic training (active control) by a matched sampling procedure. Both interventions were conducted over a period of six weeks, 3-4 one-hour sessions per week. Transfer of skills to performance on a 60-minute paper-based bookkeeping task was measured at three time points – baseline, after 10 hours and after 20 hours of training. Repeated measures ANOVA found a significant Group X Time effect on productivity (F=7.033, df=1.745; 73.273, p=0.003) with a significant interaction at both the 10-hour (Relative Cohen’s effect size = 0.38, p=0.014) and 20-hour time points (Relative Cohen’s effect size = 0.40, p=0.003). No significant effects were found on accuracy or on Conners’ Continuous Performance Test, a measure of sustained attention. The results are discussed in reference to previous findings on the relationship between brain plasticity and job performance. Generalization of results requires further study.

Aim. The objective of this study was to collect evidence of transfer-of-training to professional performance provided by two stand-alone PC-based flight games. Background. These realistic games, Falcon 4.0 (F-16 specific) and Microsoft Flight Simulator (civil aircraft), are designed for entertainment purposes, lacking any purposeful or explicit instructional support. Method. This quasi-experimental study used three pre-existing groups of gamers (n = 37; Falcon 4.0 gamers, Microsoft Flight Simulator gamers and control group: gamers without flight game experience) that performed three typical F-16 flight tasks in a high-fidelity fixed-base flight simulator. Results. The Falcon 4.0 gamers performed substantially better on almost all tasks compared to the control group, and to a lesser degree to Microsoft Flight Simulator gamers. The Falcon 4.0 group showed near- and far-transfer on almost all flight performance measures: the game had prepared them for the generic and specific military aspects of the test flight tasks. Performance of the Microsoft Flight Simulator gamers indicated only far-transfer, i.e., transfer of more generic flight skills from the game to the test flight tasks. Conclusion. Both near- and far-transfer of job related competences may occur by playing realistic entertainment games.