ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the efforts that undertaken to ameliorate decline in cognitive functions in healthy older adults through practice, training with a particular focus on working memory and its processes. It reviews the multitude of training paradigms used to address working memory and related processes as well as the theoretical motivations behind them. The chapter presents the behavioral studies conducted with older adults to address whether prolonged practice and training of working memory leads to improved, maintained and widespread effects on trained and untrained tasks. It addresses the question of whether a training program taps the central executive more broadly by addressing three critical executive control processes updating, inhibition, and shifting would give rise to more broad transfer effects in both young and old adults. To the best, the first functional brain imaging study of the neural correlates the cognitive training in adulthood and aging targeted the method of LOCI mental imagery mnemonic.
