Supporting Visual Working Memory in Healthy Aging: A Review of Current Interventions and Perspectives on Future Approaches

Visual working memory (vWM) undergoes age-related decline, affecting storage capacity, representational precision, feature binding, and inhibitory control, with consequences for everyday functioning. Nevertheless, accumulating evidence indicates that the aging brain retains substantial plasticity, providing an opportunity of intervention. This review synthesizes current evidence on approaches to improving vWM in healthy older adults, including classic and game-based cognitive training, non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS), and multimodal protocols that combine cognitive training with physical exercise or brain stimulation. Across the literature, process-based cognitive training produces improvements on trained and closely related tasks, whereas evidence for durable far-transfer remains limited. NIBS demonstrates promising neurophysiological effects, particularly when targeting frontoparietal networks, although behavioral outcomes remain heterogeneous and appear to depend on stimulation parameters and individual characteristics. Emerging findings further suggest that combining interventions may enhance selected aspects of vWM, highlighting the importance of personalized approaches. Despite these advances, intervention effects are often modest, task-specific, and resource-intensive. As a complementary approach, the review proposes placebo and nocebo effects as a theoretically grounded hypothesis that warrants empirical investigation for potentially complementing existing interventions and promoting healthy cognitive aging rather than confounds.