Childhood and adolescence

Abstract

In this chapter we discuss the importance of promoting cognitive skills during development. Mental skills are key to learning and socialization and predict success in a wide range of life outcomes. In the past years, a great bulk of research has examined the extent to which cognitive skills can be enhanced through training interventions during development. We present different approaches to training and the results of a sample of studies showing great promise to the goal of promoting children’s mental capacities. Many studies demonstrate that training cognitive skills, such as working memory, executive attention, and cognitive flexibility, leads to gains in performance of tasks that entail these very same skills (near transfer) and often extend to untrained domains (far transfer). Benefits of training seem to be larger for children with lower initial levels of cognitive skills. Although many questions remain to be answered about individual differences in training susceptibility, neural underpinnings, and generalization of training to life outcomes, we argue about the significance of this research for both school and clinic.