A semantic strategy training intervention aimed at enhancing young and older adults' visual working memory capacity

More meaningful, ‘high semantic’ visual working memory tasks are more likely than low semantic tasks to activate non-visual codes, boosting participants’ available resources and capacity. Actively combining strategies is also positively associated with task performance, and is most effective during more demanding, low semantic tasks. Data will be presented from two pre-registered experiments which assessed effects of a semantic strategy training intervention on performance of low and high semantic visual working memory (‘matrix’) tasks. Study 1, conducted remotely, focused on recognition performance of 44 young adults (18-35 yrs). Across both accuracy and response time data, effects of semantic availability, semantic training, and the interaction were not significant. However, the intervention group’s accuracy was positively correlated with reported use of semantics, specifically within the more challenging low semantic task, as predicted. Study 2 is being conducted in the lab and addresses recall performance of both young and older (aged 60+) adults (target sample size = 128). We predict that, if semantic training is more beneficial for those with lower capacity, older adults will show a greater intervention effect.