Daily Dynamics in Working Memory Training: The Role of Daily Affect, Motivation, Stress, and Nightly Sleep for Training Success in Elementary School Children

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The prospect of improving or maintaining cognitive functioning has provoked a steadily increasing number of cognitive training studies over the last decades. By now a large number of studies exist which still present heterogeneous findings, for example concerning possible far transfer effects of working memory (WM) training (e.g., Karbach & Verhaeghen, 2014; vs. Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2013; for recent meta-analyses). Near vs. far transfer refers to improvements on non-trained tasks that measure the same vs. a different construct than the trained tasks. Far transfer effects are important because training outcomes need to generalize to other cognitive abilities to optimally support participants. However, large individual differences in cognitive training and transfer outcomes exist (e.g., Lövdén et al., 2012). In my view, it is time to have a closer look at the within-person information in training data to understand these differential outcomes. Individuals likely vary in short-term within-person processes over time that eventually produce between-person differences in training outcomes (cf. Könen & Karbach, 2015). To test this approach, I propose to study short-term within-person variations in daily processes in elementary school children over several weeks of cognitive training. That is to study cognitive performance over the course of the training sessions and its interaction with important non-cognitive variables. The present work focuses on four important non-cognitive key variables in children's daily life, namely daily affect, motivation, stress, and nightly sleep, which are highly relevant for children's cognitive performance (e.g., de Veld et al., 2014; Dörrenbächer et al., 2014; Fartoukh et al. 2014; Könen et al., 2015). Studying their interaction with daily training performance contributes to under-standing individual and situational (i.e. state) characteristics related to successful training sessions, which are a precondition for successful training and transfer. Thus, a within-person perspective can contribute to understanding how between-person differences in training and transfer outcomes develop. The present project focuses on elementary school children because they are in a crucial learning phase and a central target population for early cognitive training. Three central aims of the proposed project are to (1) describe children's daily cognitive performance as well as daily affect, motivation, stress, and nightly sleep during a well-established WM training; (2) analyze the interplay of the non-cognitive variables with cognitive performance during training; and finally (3) predict training and transfer outcomes with within-person patterns from (1) and (2). Thus, the proposed work moves beyond the currently controversially discussed question whether cognitive training works on the group level (e.g., Au et al., 2016 vs. Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2016) and aims at understanding for whom and in which situations it works.