Training of Working Memory in Children With ADHD

Abstract

Working memory (WM) capacity is the ability to retain and manipulate information during a short period of time. This ability underlies complex reasoning and has generally been regarded as a fixed trait of the individual. Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) represent one group of subjects with a WM deficit, attributed to an impairment of the frontal lobe. In the present study, we used a new training paradigm with intensive and adaptive training of WM tasks and evaluated the effect of training with a double blind, placebo controlled design. Training significantly enhanced performance on the trained WM tasks. More importantly, the training significantly improved performance on a non-trained visuo-spatial WM task and on Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is a nonverbal complex reasoning task. In addition, motor activity - as measured by the number of head movements during a computerized test - was significantly reduced in the treatment group. A second experiment showed that similar ...