Abstract
Introduction The aim of this study was to employ the word-picture paradigm to examine the effectiveness of combined pictorial illustrations and sentences as strong contextual cues. The experiment details the performance of word recall in healthy older adults (HOA) and mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). The researchers enhanced the words' recall with word-picture condition and when the pair was associated with a sentence contextualizing the two items. Method The sample was composed of 18 HOA and 18 people with mild AD. Participants memorized 15 pairs of words under word-word and word-picture conditions, with and without a sentence context. In the paired-associate test, the first item of the pair was read aloud by participants and used to elicit retrieval of the associated item. Results The findings suggest that both HOA and mild-AD pictures improved item recall compared to word condition such as sentences which further enabled item recall. Additionally, the HOA group performs better than the mild-AD group in all conditions. Conclusions Word-picture and sentence context strengthen the encoding in the explicit memory task, both in HOA and mild AD. These results open a potential window to improve the memory for verbalized instructions and restore sequential abilities in everyday life, such as brushing one's teeth, fastening one's pants, or drying one's hands.
Highlights
The aim of this study was to employ the word-picture paradigm to examine the effectiveness of combined pictorial illustrations and sentences as strong contextual cues
The verbal paired associated learning (PAL) task has been used as an instrument for assessing explicit episodic memory performance in healthy older people, with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and with early Alzheimer’s disease (AD) [5,6,7,8]
There is little research that has directly examined the possibility to use sentence as a mediator in mild AD; generally, the sentence has been used to assess the problem in verbal comprehension in mild AD, as we extensively found in literature [30,31,32,33]
Summary
The aim of this study was to employ the word-picture paradigm to examine the effectiveness of combined pictorial illustrations and sentences as strong contextual cues. Word-picture and sentence context strengthen the encoding in the explicit memory task, both in HOA and mild AD. These results open a potential window to improve the memory for verbalized instructions and restore sequential abilities in everyday life, such as brushing one’s teeth, fastening one’s pants, or drying one’s hands. We used PAL task in a new way, not as an assessment instrument but like strategic memory control processes to investigate together the strategic component of episodic memory (organization and manipulation of information during encoding, storage, or retrieval) [9] and the types of mediators (pairs of words, the word followed by an image, and sentence-generation strategies) that determine individuals’ encoding performance.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
