With regard to intervention, the training-related alterations in BOLD activity found by Dahlin et al. (2008b) were also observed in an earlier study using a training regimen devised by Klingberg et al. (2002) that involves practicing several verbal and spatial WM tasks over a five-week period (Olesen et al., 2004). However, neither of these studies linked the degree of striatal BOLD increase to how much people actually gained in their WM performance from training. Brehmer et al. (2011) recently addressed this issue in a study with older adults using the training procedure of Klingberg et al. (2002). In Brehmer et al., subjects were scanned during a spatial WM task with two levels of load before and after training. As shown in Fig. 4, under the high-load condition there was a clear relationship between the degree of increased BOLD activity in bilateral caudate and the magnitude of training-related WM gains (here expressed in terms of the WM maximum score attained during the training period). These data suggest that the boost in striatal activity post training serves functional purposes.