Visual Orientation Sequence Task enhances Working Memory in Younger and Older Adults

Working memory is an important component of higher-order cognitive processes which are negatively impacted by aging effects. Recent researches have shown that plentiful behavioral training had positive impact on working memory. However, it remains difficult to achieve significant training results and thus improve the ability of working memory and general cognitive function for older adults who was suffered with cognitive decline. Based on this premise, our study aims to compare the working memory training effects in younger and older participants, and hopes to found reliable ways to improve training effects for older and cognitive ability-damaged subjects. To achieve this purpose, we recruited 42 younger (12 men, 4 women; mean age: 25.4 years) and older adults (12 men, 12 women; mean age: 69.9 years) who were divided into two subgroups randomly to participate the current experiment. We executed a visual orientation discrimination task and a modified visual orientation sequence tasks to train the visual working memory for all participants, and evaluated the training effects by comparing results of the same pre and posttests. Our results showed that both younger and older participants could benefit from the designed training tasks. These findings indicated the robust plasticity of working memory even in aging brain, and our results further suggest that more effective training gains could be achieved by adjusting the difficulty of training task for participants with different cognitive ability.