Evidence map›Paper›PMID 27474138›Full record

SynthesisPerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2016

Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of "Far Transfer": Evidence From a Meta-Analytic Review.

Monica Melby-Lervåg, Thomas S Redick, Charles Hulme

Open access · bronzeAbstract readMeta-AnalysisReview
PubMed Full text at PMC Publisher
In one paragraph

Synthesis in Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 323 papers, 11 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
323citing papers in PubMed, 11 pooled it
88.5field-weighted citation impact, top 1% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

323 citing papers in PubMed, 11 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 862 citations in OpenAlex.

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  15. Neurology(R) neuroimmunology & neuroinflammation · 2026
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263 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.

Monica Melby-LervågDepartment of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo.
Thomas S RedickDepartment of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University tredick@purdue.edu.
Charles HulmeDivision of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, and Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo.
University College London · GBUniversity of Oslo · NO

Funding

Behavioral Disinhibition in Early-onset AlcoholismR01AA013650 · NIAAA · TRUSTEES OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY · PI FINN, PETER R · 2002 to 2018
$5.5M
NIAAA NIH HHS R01 AA013650
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

It has been claimed that working memory training programs produce diverse beneficial effects. This article presents a meta-analysis of working memory training studies (with a pretest-posttest design and a control group) that have examined transfer to other measures (nonverbal ability, verbal ability, word decoding, reading comprehension, or arithmetic; 87 publications with 145 experimental comparisons). Immediately following training there were reliable improvements on measures of intermediate transfer (verbal and visuospatial working memory). For measures of far transfer (nonverbal ability, verbal ability, word decoding, reading comprehension, arithmetic) there was no convincing evidence of any reliable improvements when working memory training was compared with a treated control condition. Furthermore, mediation analyses indicated that across studies, the degree of improvement on working memory measures was not related to the magnitude of far-transfer effects found. Finally, analysis of publication bias shows that there is no evidential value from the studies of working memory training using treated controls. The authors conclude that working memory training programs appear to produce short-term, specific training effects that do not generalize to measures of "real-world" cognitive skills. These results seriously question the practical and theoretical importance of current computerized working memory programs as methods of training working memory skills.

Indexed as

Cognitive RemediationHumansIntelligenceMemory, Short-TermTransfer, Psychologymeta-analysistrainingtransferworking memory

Identifiers

PMID27474138
PMCPMC4968033
OpenAlexW2480700159

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceTDM
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.