MRI Predictors of Cognitive Training Outcomes
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REVIEW
MRI Predictors of Cognitive Training Outcomes Ebru Baykara 1 & Tanja Könen 1 & Kerstin Unger 2 & Julia Karbach 1 Received: 17 December 2019 / Accepted: 28 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The prospect of improving or maintaining cognitive functioning has provoked a steadily increasing number of cognitive training interventions over the last years, especially for clinical and elderly populations. However, there are discrepancies between the findings of the studies. One of the reasons behind these heterogeneous findings is that there are vast inter-individual differences in how people benefit from the training and in the extent that training-related gains are transferred to other untrained tasks and domains. In this paper, we address the value of incorporating neural measures to cognitive training studies in order to fully understand the mechanisms leading to inter-individual differences in training gains and their generalizability to other tasks. Our perspective is that it is necessary to collect multimodal neural measures in the pre- and post-training phase, which can enable us to understand the factors contributing to successful training outcomes. More importantly, this understanding can enable us to predict who will benefit from different types of interventions, thereby allowing the development of individually tailored intervention programs. Keywords Neuroimaging . Cognitive training . Cognitive plasticity . Neural plasticity . Individual differences
Introduction Cognitive training has become increasingly popular (see Strobach and Karbach 2020, for a review) as the elderly population has rising life expectancy and therefore growing risk of cognitive and functional decline. Moreover, the cognitive demands for academic and occupational success are increasing with each generation. The main promise of cognitive training interventions is to induce lasting performance gains in cognitive domains that go beyond the practiced task and are relevant for daily functioning. Training-induced changes are thought to be triggered by a prolonged mismatch between situational demands and range of functions and performance an individual’s cognitive system is able to support (Lövdén et al. 2010). This mismatch fosters adaptive structural brain changes (e.g., neurogenesis, synaptogenesis, long-term potentiation) that effectively increase the possible range of
* Ebru Baykara [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Koblenz-Landau, Landau/ Pfalz, Germany
2
Department of Psychology, Queens College, City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA
cognitive performance to meet the altered environmental demands. Although the results of many training studies are promising, there is high variability across studies and individuals in such training-induced plastic changes (e.g., Katz et al. 2016, for a review), and even meta-analyses on the topic reveal conflicting conclusions (e.g., Kassai et al. 2019; MelbyLervåg and Hulme 2016 vs. Au et al. 2016; Karbach and Verhaeghen 2014; Nguyen et al. 201
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