Training Three Facets of Executive Functions

Abstract

Given the importance of executive functions for everyday life, recent years have seen a tremendous interest in whether the basic cognitive abilities involved can be improved by training. The present research investigated whether, compared to an active control group, the three main facets of executive cognitive functions - task switching, updating, and inhibition (Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, & Howerter, 2000) - can be trained jointly via intense adaptive online training of 5 weeks. Using a large sample and two training tasks per facet, we obtained clear evidence for increased task performance on all six tasks, suggesting that the three facets can be trained simultaneously, with some tasks showing very large in-task training gains. However, the evidence for correlated in-task training gains and for intermediate transfer effects on related but untrained tasks from pre- to posttest was very weak. Further random slopes analyses suggested that individuals benefit differently from training. These results warrant caution against general and sweeping claims about the far-reaching impact of cognitive training. They rather are in line with a more nuanced view according to which the training of executive functions is specific in at least three important ways.

Keywords: executive functions; inhibition; task-switching; transfer; working memory.