The time course of updating in running span.

Running span can be performed by either passively listening to memory items or actively updating the target set. Previous research suggests that the active updating process is demanding and time consuming and is favored at slow rates of presentation while the passive strategy is employed at fast rates. Two experiments examined the time course of recruitment of resources during task performance and its sensitivity to presentation rate.

Can short-term memory be trained?

Is the capacity of short-term memory fixed, or does it improve with practice? It is already known that training on complex working memory tasks is more likely to transfer to untrained tasks with similar properties, but this approach has not been extended to the more basic short-term memory system responsible for verbal serial recall. Here we investigated this with adaptive training algorithms widely applied in working memory training. Serial recall of visually presented digits was found to improve over the course of 20 training sessions, but this improvement did not extend to recall of either spoken digits or visually presented letters.

Feature coding dataset for trained and untrained working memory tasks in randomized controlled trials of working memory training.

The data presented in this article are produced as part of the original research article entitled "Working memory training involves learning new skills" (Gathercole, Dunning, Holmes & Norris, in press). This article presents a dataset of coded features for pairs of trained and untrained working memory (WM) tasks from randomized controlled trials of WM training with active control groups. Feature coding is provided for 113 untrained WM tasks each paired with the most similar task in the training program, taken from 23 training studies.