Examining Varied Activities and Strategy Use in Working Memory Training for Children

Working memory training programs have grown increasingly popular in educational and clinical settings, widely used with the hope of improving children's cognitive and behavioural functioning. This thesis examined whether greater variety in training activities enhances outcomes in primary school children, and whether training changes strategy use on untrained working memory tasks. No training condition outperformed the control on measures of working memory, reasoning, or behavioural functioning, and training did not change strategy use. These findings contribute to growing evidence of no benefits of working memory training in typically developing children, and challenge the assumption that variation maximises training outcomes.