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.

Se estudió el efecto de la inducción emocional en una tarea de memoria prospectiva basada en eventos mediante la presentación de fotografías negativas, neutras y positivas de manera posterior a la realización de la conducta intencionada. No se encontraron efectos sobre la tasa de memoria prospectiva; sin embargo, se obtuvo una correlación positiva entre ésta y la tasa de reconocimiento incidental de las fotografías, y en el mismo sentido con el tiempo de ejecución medio de la conducta intencionada; además de una correlación negativa respecto al número de errores cometidos en la tarea de fondo. Se analizan las implicaciones de estos resultados y la utilización de procedimientos operantes para analizar el efecto de la emoción sobre la memoria prospectiva.

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