Training And Transfer Effects Of Interference Control Training In Children And Adults

Interference control is one of the core components in executive functioning.Interference control has been suggested to be a central feature of WM.However,no studies so far have examined transfer effects of a training program exclusively and directly targeting interference control.Forty-one 10?12 year-old children and 47 18?24 year-old adults were assigned to an adaptive interference control training or active control condition.Transfer of training effects to tasks measuring interference control,response inhibition,WM updating,task-switching,and non-verbal fluid intelligence were assessed during a 3-month follow-up session and/or an immediate post-training session.Substantial evidence for training improvements and a short-lived positive transfer effect to a non-trained interference control task were observed for both the children and adults.Marginal evidence for a short-lived better performance of the trained compared to non-trained participants was found for a WM task for both the children and adults,and for the children for another interference control task and a response-inhibition task.These results suggest some potential for interference control training programs to enhance aspects of cognitive functioning,with some evidence for a more wide-spread transfer for children compared to adults.