Abstract
Recent work in cognitive psychology showed that retrieval practice of previously studied information can insulate this information against retroactive interference from subsequently studied other information in healthy individuals. The present study examined whether this beneficial effect of interference reduction is also present in patients with stroke. Twenty-two patients with stroke, 4.6 months post injury on average, and 22 healthy controls participated in the experiment. In each of two experimental sessions, participants first studied a list of items (list 1) and then underwent a practice phase in which the list 1 items were either restudied or retrieval practiced. Participants then either studied a second list of items (list 2) or fulfilled an unrelated distractor task. Recall of the two lists’ items was assessed in a final criterion test. Results showed that, in healthy controls, additional study of list 2 items impaired final recall of list 1 items in the restudy condition but not in the retrieval practice condition. In contrast, in patients with stroke, list 2 learning impaired final list 1 recall in both conditions. The results indicate that retrieval practice insulated the tested information against retroactive interference in healthy controls, but failed to do so in patients with stroke. Possible implications of the findings for the understanding of long-term memory impairment after stroke are discussed.
Highlights
Stroke is often accompanied by residual cognitive impairments (Hochstenbach et al, 1998), commonly involving impairments of memory and attention, slowed information processing, and executive dysfunction (Lim and Alexander, 2009; Cumming et al, 2013)
With regard to episodic memory, in general, stroke patients show reduced memory performance compared with healthy controls, with the prevalence of post-stroke memory impairment typically declining with increasing time after the stroke, ranging from about a 50% decline weeks after stroke to about a 10% decline one year after stroke (Snaphaan and De Leeuw, 2007)
The three-way interaction between all three factors was reliable, F(1,40) = 4.77, p = 0.035, partial η2 = 0.11, which qualified the only remaining significant interaction between the factors the retrieval-practice condition (67.0% vs. 44.3%). These results indicate that retrieval practice did not insulate the list 1 items against retroactive interference from list 2 in patients with stroke
Summary
Stroke is often accompanied by residual cognitive impairments (Hochstenbach et al, 1998), commonly involving impairments of memory and attention, slowed information processing, and executive dysfunction (Lim and Alexander, 2009; Cumming et al, 2013). The episodic context account of retrieval-based learning assumes that testing improves long-term retention because retrieval practice, more than restudy, enhances contextual processing of the practiced information (Karpicke et al, 2014) Another prominent benefit of retrieval practice, referred to as the forward effect of testing in the literature (Pastötter and Bäuml, 2014), is the finding that retrieval practice of previously studied information can increase retention of subsequently studied other information (e.g., Szpunar et al, 2008; Pastötter et al, 2011). Such deficits in contextual processing may impair discrimination between target and non-target lists and reduce or even eliminate the interference reduction effect in patients with stroke Both persons with stroke, 4.6 months post injury on average, and healthy controls participated in the present study. On the basis of the view that the interference reduction effect reflects enhanced contextual processing (Halamish and Bjork, 2011; Abel and Bäuml, 2014), the effect in persons with stroke should be reduced, or even be eliminated, because contextual processing may be impaired after stroke (Kessels et al, 2002; Swick et al, 2006)
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