Training And Transfer Effects Of Prospective Memory Training In Children And Adults

Prospective memory(PM)plays a crucial role in our daily life,and which also plays a vital role in children's academic achievement and interpersonal relationships.PM could be improved through cognitive training.While there is lack of studies exploring training and transfer effects of processed based PM in healthy young adolescents.This study recruited respectively 13-to 15-year-old children and 19-to24-year-old adults in experiment one and experiment two,training groups participated in an 8-day PM training program using the Virtual Week computer game.After training session,assessed the far-transfer effect of training effect through Go/Nogo task,Stroop task,Flanker task,Switching task,Working memory updating task and Raven's standard progressive matrices test;measured the near-transfer effect using Virtual Week task,Time-based prospective memory task and Event-based prospective memory task.Observed the maintenance effect of training benefits after 3and/or 6 months after training.Finally,conducted a combination analysis on data of children and adults to explore the differences of transfer and training effects in children and adults,and PM training whether has particularity in adolescents.Resulted revealed that PM could be improved by restorative training in training group compared to control group,and showed a near-transfer effects in virtual week task and time-based PM task,far-transfer effect in working memory updating task,and these transfer effects has a better maintenance effect,but training effect did not present at the rest of tasks(in Experiment one).PM also could be promoted by restorative approach in training group compared to control group,while training effect only transferred to virtual week task revealed a near-transfer effect,and other tasks did not present any training effects(in Experiment two).Combination analysis found that PM could be enhanced through restorative approach in early adolescents and adults,while training effect is better in adolescents than early adults,namely effects of transfer and maintenance are more significant in adolescents than early adults.In conclusion,these results suggested that adolescents and early adults' PMcould be improved through restorative approach,and significant training-induced positive transfer and maintenance effects were revealed.These findings also demonstrated PM also has plasticity in these two groups,more important,children's PM has more strong plasticity than early adults.