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I’ve seen studies evidencing near transfer but not far transfer. I also did a Q&A on this a while back.
I’ll copy the relevant snippet:
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*“Now, I guess the natural question is, how do you increase the amount of actual effort you can put forth in working memory?
The answer is unclear. I did a literature search on this about a year ago, and from what I gathered, it seems that it’s unclear whether it’s even possible to increase your working memory capacity in that sense—how many digits or chunks you can actively hold in your working memory.
There have been studies on this, and it’s something that would be really useful if it were possible to increase working memory capacity reliably. However, in most studies, when people practice something like a digit span test, they can improve on that task. But when you then evaluate them on a different working memory loading task, they don’t tend to improve on it. What tends to happen is they find a way to hack the task, leveraging long-term memory, rather than actually increasing their effort in working memory. They find a way to exploit the situation.
For example, you might have heard of memory palaces, where you visualize information in a specific location, like a house with different rooms. This is an example of a hack that doesn’t actually increase your working memory capacity. It’s leveraging long-term memory structures to help with the task at hand. If you practice using a memory palace technique to improve your working memory, you aren’t actually increasing your working memory capacity; you’re just mapping the task onto a structure you already have in long-term memory.
You can improve your performance on working memory tasks, but it doesn’t seem to transfer reliably to other tasks. I recall seeing some papers where people were able to improve on one working memory task, and that improvement carried over partially to another task of a similar nature. But as the tasks become more different, the effect diminishes.
The state of the research is unclear. There isn’t much support for the idea that you can train your working memory capacity to carry over into real-life situations, like academics. I remember reading work from math interventionists who worked with students struggling in math, often because of low working memory. Their approach wasn’t to train the students to increase their working memory capacity but to help them store more math in long-term memory. By doing that, the students could handle more math without relying as much on their working memory.
It seems the best bet, if you want to increase your working memory capacity, is to write more relevant information into long-term memory. The more automatic your recall is from long-term memory, the easier it becomes to pull that information into working memory without putting in as much effort.
I should mention that I’m not saying it’s impossible to increase your working memory capacity. I’m just saying that, as of the current research, there’s no serious support for that idea yet. However, it’s definitely an interesting topic.
At the current state of things, the best way to increase your working memory capacity seems to be by writing more information into long-term memory. You can develop automaticity with that information so you can recall it easily and use it for chunking purposes. If you try to train yourself on a working memory task, like digit span, and you improve your ability, you shouldn’t expect that to carry over into other areas of your life.
It reminds me of a paper where someone trained their digit span. They chunked the numbers into groups, associating them with running times, such as a fast mile time or a 5K time. They could remember large numbers by thinking about these times, but when asked to remember a sequence of colors, their performance didn’t improve.”*
Overall, I’m not too hopeful. If, later down the road, a working memory training technique comes out with solid evidence of far transfer, that would be a pleasant surprise to me! But I’m not holding my breath.
TLDR: There is extensive empirical research here and to my knowledge none of it has yielded evidence of a method for increasing working memory capacity on far-transfer tasks in people without deficits. If you have a successful method then you should publish it and collect your Nobel Prize.
Related reading:
- People Differ in Learning Speed, Not Learning Style - see section “Lack of Evidence for WMC Training,” which includes plenty of specific references to the literature.
- You Can Effectively Turn Long-Term Memory Into an Extension of Working Memory
- A White Pill on Cognitive Differences
And some tweets: here, here, here.
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