The Effect of Longitudinal Training on Working Memory Capacities: An Exploratory EEG Study

The study of working memory (WM) is a hot topic in recent years and accumulating literatures underlying the achievement and neural mechanism of WM. However, the effect of WM training on cognitive functions were rarely studied. In this study, nineteen healthy young subjects participated in a longitudinal design with one week N-back training (N=1,2,3,4). Experimental results demonstrated that training procedure could help the subjects master more complex psychological tasks when comparing the pre-training performance with those post-training. More specifically, the behavior accuracy increased from 68.14 +/- 9.34%, 45.09 +/- 14.90%, 39.12 +/- 12.71%, and 32.11 +/- 10.98% for 1-back, 2-back, 3-back and 4-back respectively to 73.52 +/- 4.01%, 69.14 +/- 5.28%, 69.09 +/- 6.41% and 64.41 +/- 5.12% after training. Furthermore, we applied electroencephalogram (EEG) power and functional connectivity to reveal the neural mechanisms of this beneficial effect and found that the EEG power of delta, theta and alpha band located in the left temporal and occipital lobe increased significantly. Meanwhile, the functional connectivity strength also increased obviously in delta and theta band. In sum, we showed positive effect of WM training on psychological performance and explored the neural mechanisms. Our findings may have the implications for enhancing the performance of participants who are prone to cognitive.