Cogmed Working Memory Training

Notre Dame Pro­fes­sor Bradley Gib­son, whom we inter­viewed a few months ago (see below) pre­sent­ed the results from his study recent­ly at the Soci­ety for Research in Child Devel­op­ment (SRCD):

Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame Pro­fes­sor and Research Team are First in U.S. to Val­i­date Break­through Study on the Effec­tive­ness of Work­ing Mem­o­ry Train­ing in Improv­ing Atten­tion Deficits in Chil­dren (pdf)

• “Dr. Bradley Gib­son, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame, and his col­leagues (Gib­son, Seroczyn­s­ki, Gon­do­li, Braun­gart-Riek­er, & Grundy, 2007)  will share new find­ings from the first U.S. study on the effec­tive­ness of Cogmed Work­ing Mem­o­ry Train­ing for improv­ing atten­tion abil­i­ties in chil­dren with ADHD. The study val­i­dates pre­vi­ous research from Swe­den’s Karolin­s­ka Insti­tute which revealed a fun­da­men­tal break­through in the way atten­tion prob­lems are proac­tive­ly treat­ed. Gib­son will unveil the results of the U.S. study dur­ing the Soci­ety for Research in Child Devel­op­ment (SRCD) bi-annu­al con­fer­ence in Boston. Cogmed is a pio­neer in neu­rotech­nol­o­gy and a devel­op­er of soft­ware-based work­ing mem­o­ry train­ing products.”

Our inter­view with Notre Dame’s Bradley Gibson

• AF: Tell us about ADD/ ADHD and devel­op­ment tra­jec­to­ries.
• BG: There is a very insight­ful study by Wal­ter Mis­chel on pre-school­ers aged 4 and 5. Some of them had a bet­ter abil­i­ty to con­trol their atten­tion and delay grat­i­fi­ca­tion (mea­sured as the capac­i­ty not to imme­di­ate­ly eat a marsh­mal­low but to wait for a larg­er pos­te­ri­or reward), and those kids were shown, 14 years lat­er, to be hap­pi­er, have bet­ter over­all school grades, score around 200 points high­er in the SAT, and, when test­ed, dis­play bet­ter exec­u­tive func­tion­ing over­all. The study showed that there are indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences at very young ages-and the impor­tant impli­ca­tions from this fact. Now, the part that I con­sid­er more excit­ing is that these dif­fer­ences are not fixed. Train­ing is very important

You can learn more about Cogmed Work­ing Mem­o­ry Train­ing and RoboMemo.

Oth­er inter­views in our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series:

You can meet the Cogmed team by attend­ing our pan­el on Brain Fit­ness at Neu­rotech Indus­try Con­fer­ence, May 17th in San Francisco.