Training and Transfer of Executive Functions for police- and Military Related Tasks

Abstract The demands of everyday police work are determined almost exclusively by attentional processes and their unrestricted performance under high stress and under pressure (whereby time pressure is an essential criterion in a high-stress situation). A literature search concerned the trainability and transferability of the executive functions shifting, updating, inhibition trainability, and transferability in basic cognitive and police-related tasks. The six studies showed good training gains for the number-letter task (shifting), the Stroop task, and the stop-signal task (inhibition). The studies demonstrated that shifting predominantly contributed to the consistency of risk perception, and inhibition to applying decision rules in applied contexts. Best transfer effects were found for inhibition when task requirements and context were most similar, for instance, in decision accuracy prediction and decision accuracy in shoot/don’t shoot tasks with live weapons and live ammunition. However, in all applied training investigated in the present paper, inhibition was not trained isolated but simultaneously within a range of skills. In terms of promoting brain plasticity, and increasing cognitive flexibility, the most promising approach seems to be a combined training of executive functions regarding specific, well-defined police or military operations.