Klingberg Torkel, Forssberg Hans, Westerberg Helena
Department of Neuropediatrics, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.
J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 2002 Sep;24(6):781-91. doi: 10.1076/jcen.24.6.781.8395.
Working memory (WM) capacity is the ability to retain and manipulate information during a short period of time. This ability underlies complex reasoning and has generally been regarded as a fixed trait of the individual. Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) represent one group of subjects with a WM deficit, attributed to an impairment of the frontal lobe. In the present study, we used a new training paradigm with intensive and adaptive training of WM tasks and evaluated the effect of training with a double blind, placebo controlled design. Training significantly enhanced performance on the trained WM tasks. More importantly, the training significantly improved performance on a nontrained visuo-spatial WM task and on Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is a nonverbal complex reasoning task. In addition, motor activity--as measured by the number of head movements during a computerized test--was significantly reduced in the treatment group. A second experiment showed that similar training-induced improvements on cognitive tasks are also possible in young adults without ADHD. These results demonstrate that performance on WM tasks can be significantly improved by training, and that the training effect also generalizes to nontrained tasks requiring WM. Training improved performance on tasks related to prefrontal functioning and had also a significant effect on motor activity in children with ADHD. The results thus suggest that WM training potentially could be of clinical use for ameliorating the symptoms in ADHD.
工作记忆（WM）容量是指在短时间内保留和处理信息的能力。这种能力是复杂推理的基础，通常被视为个体的一种固定特质。患有注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）的儿童是一组存在工作记忆缺陷的受试者，这归因于额叶功能受损。在本研究中，我们使用了一种新的训练范式，对工作记忆任务进行强化和适应性训练，并采用双盲、安慰剂对照设计评估训练效果。训练显著提高了训练的工作记忆任务的表现。更重要的是，训练显著提高了未训练的视觉空间工作记忆任务以及瑞文渐进性矩阵测验（一种非语言复杂推理任务）的表现。此外，治疗组中通过计算机化测试期间头部运动次数衡量的运动活动显著减少。第二项实验表明，在没有ADHD的年轻人中，类似的训练诱导的认知任务改善也是可能的。这些结果表明，通过训练可以显著提高工作记忆任务的表现，并且训练效果还可以推广到需要工作记忆的未训练任务。训练提高了与前额叶功能相关任务的表现，并且对患有ADHD的儿童的运动活动也有显著影响。因此，结果表明工作记忆训练可能在临床上用于改善ADHD的症状。
