We provide for the first time clear evidence of the important role strategies have in memory training: training makes participants to adopt various strategies to manage the task, which then affects the outcome of the training. Strategy acquisition can also explain why the effects of memory training are so limited. Typically, improvements are limited only to tasks that are very similar to the training task – training has provided ways to handle a given type of task, but not much else. The study was just published in Journal of Memory and Language:

Fellman, D., Jylkkä, J., Waris, O., Soveri, A., Ritakallio, L., Haga, S., Salmi, J., Nyman, TN., & Laine, M. (2019). The role of strategy use in working memory training outcomes. Journal of Memory and Language. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104064. [Epub ahead of print]