Age-Independent Transfer After Successful Associative Mnemonic Training

Generalization of training to support the performance on new tasks—transfer—has been much studied. One hypothesis is that transfer occurs if overlapping neuronal circuits are engaged in both training and transfer tasks. Here, we investigated transfer effects in the domain of episodic memory by following 356 participants between 20 and 83 years who downloaded and used a smart phone application to practice the method of loci (MoL) over 3 months. We measured transfer of MoL training to three associative memory tasks with hypothesized neurocognitive overlap (binding in the hippocampus) with the trained task. Transfer tasks were administered at the beginning of training and when two specific proficiency levels in Loci training were reached. Results showed robust transfer effects across the age span at both levels. These results indicate that app-based strategy training can lead to enhancement of episodic memory beyond the specific training task, which may have clinical implementations.