Retraction of “Gaining Control: Training Executive Function and Far Transfer of the Ability to Resolve Interference”

This article has been retracted by both of the authors. During further extension of this work, it was discovered that a mistake had been made in the programming of the working memory training tasks used in this study. This error resulted in the presentation of repeated trial sequences, which were then practiced repeatedly over the 8-day training period. This practice likely resulted in learning of the sequences, rather than training of interference control as we had originally inferred. The first author takes responsibility for this error, and both authors regret the publication of invalid results. In a separate replication (N = 16) of the working memory training condition that used randomized, novel sequences for each of the 8 training days, we were not able to reproduce the main findings of the original report. Table 1 presents inferential statistics comparing performance in the Day 1 and Day 8 training sessions, in the originally published data and the data from the attempted replication. As the table shows, no significant training effect (i.e., reduced interference resolution) was observed for either type of stimulus (faces, letters) when the correctly randomized trial sequence was used. Table 2 presents inferential statistics comparing performance on the transfer tasks before and after training, in the previously published data and the new data. As the table shows, no significant effect of training on performance in any of the three transfer tasks was found in the new data set. Retraction of “Gaining Control: Training Executive Function and Far Transfer of the Ability to Resolve Interference”