Subject area	Psychology
More specific subject area	Cognitive psychology
Type of data	Excel spreadsheet
How data were acquired	Taken from published reports and where necessary supplied by authors on request
Data format	Raw
Experimental factors	None
Experimental features	Pairs of trained and untrained working memory tasks were coded according to a novel feature coding protocol
Data source location	Data are held in the home institutions of the 23 original articles listed inTable 1
Data accessibility	Data supplied with the article
Related research article	Gathercole SE, Dunning DL, Holmes J, Norris DG. Working memory training involves learning new skills. J Mem & Lang. in press. [1]