The Effects of Home-Based Cognitive Training on Verbal Working Memory and Language Comprehension in Older Adulthood

Abstract

Effective language understanding is crucial to maintaining cognitive abilities and learning new information through adulthood. However, age-related declines in working memory (WM) have a robust negative influence on multiple aspects of language comprehension and use, potentially limiting communicative competence. In the current study (N = 41), we examined the effects of a novel home-based computerized cognitive training program targeting verbal WM on changes in verbal WM and language comprehension in healthy older adults relative to an active component-control group. Participants in the WM training group showed non-linear improvements in performance on trained verbal WM tasks. Relative to the active control group, WM training participants also showed improvements on untrained verbal WM tasks and selective improvements across untrained dimensions of language, including sentence memory, verbal fluency, and comprehension of syntactically ambiguous sentences. Though the current study is preliminary in nature, it does provide initial promising evidence that WM training may influence components of language comprehension in adulthood and suggests that home-based training of WM may be a viable option for probing the scope and limits of cognitive plasticity in older adults.

Keywords: aging; cognitive training; language; working memory.

FIGURE 1

CONSORT diagram for iTrain study.

FIGURE 2

Training group percent change from baseline in working memory (WM) span on three training tasks over 15 sessions.

FIGURE 3

Scatterplot matrix of the relationship between training improvements over 15 training sessions across each of the three WM training tasks. The lower diagonal cells are bivariate scatterplots and best-fit linear functions of the relationship between WM training gains across each pair of tasks. The upper diagonal presents the corresponding Pearson correlation coefficient for each pair of training tasks. The diagonal cells plots the estimated probability density functions of the individual training improvements in each task. Note that training improvements were z-score standardized, so that 0 represents average training improvement, and a 1 unit increase represents an approximate 1 SD improvement.

FIGURE 4

Effect sizes (Cohen’s d) and 95% bootstrapped confidence intervals of the training group × time interaction for WM (Left) and language (Right) measures from the neuropsychological test battery. More positive values indicate a greater change from pre-test to post-test for the training group relative to the control group.

FIGURE 5

Effects of training on syntactic ambiguity resolution accuracy.