Multimodal cognitive training with an immersive virtual reality marksmanship task and mindfulness mediation

Background: There is growing interest in cognitive training approaches to enhance the cognitive substrates of performance in complex environments. While there is evidence to support the efficacy of cognitive training interventions for enhancing performance on untrained tasks (Jaeggi et al., 2008), some (e.g., Schwaighofer et al., 2015; Klingberg, 2010) have questioned the extent to which cognitive training derived benefits are generalisable. The lack of generalisable benefits from cognitive training might stem from the tendency for these interventions to train a singular cognitive modality – attention or working memory, for example – while complex task performance relies on integrated functions of several cognitive processes. Cognitive training interventions that incorporate several cognitive modalities in distinct situations and environments might better afford gains in cognitive capacity (Sala & Gobet, 2017; Sprenger et al., 2013).