Monday, July 26, 2010

Working memory and IQ brain clock training and mechanisms linked?

It is no secret that I believe that there is a significant link between contemporary working memory (and training related studies) and mental timing mechanisms (and training to improve) that can not be ignored.  I keep running across the common neurological mechanisms of the frontal (esp. the dorsolateral PFC) and parietal cortex's, the frontal-parietal loop, the basal ganglia and dopamine.  I have hypothesized about this in a variety of posts (esp. the possibility of a temporal g domain-general mechanism) and have made this link in a couple on-line PPT slide shows.  Klingberg's article below is entirely consistent with these hypotheses (click here for more info on Klingberg's strong program of working memory research).

Klingberg, T. (2010).  Training and plasticity of working memory.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14 (7), 317-324. (click here to view)

Working memory (WM) capacity predicts performance in a wide range of cognitive tasks. Although WM capacity has been viewed as a constant trait, recent studies suggest that it can be improved by adaptive and extended training. This training is associated with changes in brain activity in frontal and parietal cortex and basal ganglia, as well as changes in dopamine receptor density. Transfer of the training effects to non-trained WM tasks is consistent with the notion of training-induced plasticity in a common neural network for WM. The observed training effects suggest that WM training could be used as a remediating intervention for individuals for whom low WM capacity is a limiting factor for academic performance or in everyday life.

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