Extending Brain-Training to the Affective Domain: Increasing Cognitive and Affective Executive Control through Emotional Working Memory Training

Schewizer, Hampshire, and Dalgleish (2011) conducted a study investigating whether brain-training, specifically working memory (WM) training, improves cognitive functions beyond the training task. Their focus was on emotional material, arguing that it constitutes much of the information we process on a daily basis. The research suggests WM training improves performance in other WM tasks and in fluid intelligence, but only WM training involving emotional material improves affective information on an emotional Stroop task.

Summary: 

The authors began by differentiating between the areas of cognitive ability brain-training claims to improve, namely working memory (the capacity to actively maintain bits of information in the presence of distractions), fluid intelligence (abstract reasoning and problem-solving abilities), and control over emotional or personal material you want to disengage or engage with. They asserted that for any brain-training methodology to have a wide impact on real-world cognitive functions, there needs to be a transfer across training content. Their main question of interest  was can cognitive training with only neutral information have transferable benefits to cognitive processing of personally relevant material.

Forty-five participants received WM training using either emotional or neutral material, or an undemanding control task. The authors used already established and validated tasks to test transfer effects by modifying the dual n-back task to examine WM and fluid intelligence. They used three versions, one with neutral words and faces, the second with highly emotional words and negative facial expressions (an emotional Stroop task), and a third non-WM-dependent feature that matched the control group's "training". Both groups receiving training showed linear improvement significantly greater than the control group in terms of completion time. Training performance and cognitive transfer affect between the two trained groups did not vary significantly in the digit span task but did in terms of affective transfer effects where the affective training group showed significant pre- to post-training improvements in emotional Stroop performance. Neither the neutral training group or the control group demonstrated affective training effects.

Critique:

The study was well done in terms of providing adequate background research in addition to explaining their process and results clearly. They took care for controlling mitigating factors that could affect the results, subjecting all three groups of participants to pre-testing to ensure the mean of each group was on the same level. The authors used already validated tasks for testing which strengthened their results. As the emotional Stroop test only looks at the cognitive reaction effects of words with negative connotations, I would be interested in seeing if there is similar affective transfer effects for positively emotionally charged words.

The findings related to better controlling cognitive abilities despite the presence of distractions, particularly in relation to emotional information, relevant or distracting to the task, is of utmost importance to members of the intelligence community. This study suggests that appropriate brain-training can improve decision making in situations that would require the manipulation of emotional material, something analysts commonly have to do.

Source: 

Schweizer S, Hampshire A, Dalgleish T (2011) Extending brain-training to the affective domain: Increasing cognitive and affective executive control through emotional working memory training. PLoS ONE 6(9): e24372. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024372

The effects of active learning on students' memories for course content

This article published in Active Learning in Higher Education determines active learning techniques and their relation to the course content retained by students in a higher education setting. Two studies performed by the author identified that students cited memory of activities which actively engaged them and forced them to reflect upon concepts.

Study 1
A group of 250 undergraduate students enrolled in three different courses at private Midwestern liberal arts college were provided with a survey on the last day of class. Participants were enrolled in introductory courses. The participants were instructed to write down ten things they remembered from the course. The survey instructed the participants to freely report anything that they remembered. The survey was left anonymous. The participant responses were coded for their level of understanding and the frequencies were summarized. Results showed that the videos and in class active exercises were most cited in the participant free responses.

Study 2
A group of 64 undergraduate students enrolled in three different courses at private Midwestern liberal arts college were provided with a survey on the last day of class. The participants were enrolled in advanced courses. The participants were instructed to write down ten things they remembered from the course. The survey instructed the participants to freely report anything that they remembered. The survey was not anonymous. The participant responses were coded for their level of understanding and the frequencies were summarized. Results showed that the videos and in class active exercises were most cited in the participant free responses just like those found in the introductory courses.

Source
The effects of active learning on students' memories for course content
Cherney, Isabelle D.
Active Learning in Higher Education, Jul 2008; vol. 9: pp. 152-171