Abstract
A decline in visuospatial Working Memory (vWM) is a hallmark of cognitive aging across various tasks, and facing this decline has become the target of several studies. In the current study we tested whether older adults can benefit from task repetition in order to improve their performance in a vWM task. While learning by task repetition has been shown to improve vWM performance in young adulthood, little is known on whether a similar enhancement can be achieved also by the aging population. By combining different behavioral and electrophysiological measures, we investigated whether practicing a specific task (delayed match-to-sample judgement) over four consecutive sessions could improve vWM in healthy aging, and which are the neurophysiological and cognitive mechanisms modulated by learning. Behavioral data revealed that task repetition boosted performance in older participants, both in terms of sensitivity to change (as revealed by d’ measures) as well as capacity estimate (as measured by k values). At the electrophysiological level, results indicated that only after task repetition both target individuation (as evidenced by the N2pc) and vWM maintenance (as reflected by the CDA) were modulated by target numerosity. Our results suggest that repetition learning is effective in enhancing vWM in aging and acts through modifications at different stages of stimulus processing.
Highlights
A decline in visuospatial Working Memory is a hallmark of cognitive aging across various tasks, and facing this decline has become the target of several studies
In the current study we tested whether older adults can benefit from task repetition in order to improve their performance in a visuospatial Working Memory (vWM) task
Previous studies on young adults have indicated that repetition of different vWM tasks produces positive outcomes, both after a variable number of sessions performed in different days[21], and within the same s ession[24,25,26,27]
Summary
A decline in visuospatial Working Memory (vWM) is a hallmark of cognitive aging across various tasks, and facing this decline has become the target of several studies. Previous studies on young adults have indicated that repetition of different vWM tasks (e.g. delayed matchto-sample, n-back) produces positive outcomes, both after a variable number of sessions performed in different days[21] (see a lso[22,23] for extensive practice during more complex training intervention or electrical stimulation studies), and within the same s ession[24,25,26,27] These enhancements are usually visible in terms of increase in accuracy and/or speed, and have been associated with a modulation of the neural activity at different stages of stimulus processing (e.g. encoding, categorization, depending on the task c hosen[21,24,25,26,27]). It is a (relatively) simple and rapid way to evaluate whether a specific ability can be enhanced in older adults
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