Effect of spaced repetitions on amnesia patients' recall and recognition performance.

Abstract

This study examined the effects of repetition and spacing of repetitions on amnesia patients' recognition and recall of a list of words. Like controls, amnesia patients recognized items better when repetitions were spaced compared with when they were massed. This finding was attributed to the additional rehearsal that distributed presentations typically encourage. Amnesia patients also showed normal spacing effects in a recall task, suggesting that they were able to benefit from the variable encoding that spaced repetitions allow to establish additional retrieval cues. However, even though instructions to encode repeated items in a variable manner enhanced massed presentations to the point where spacing no longer produced an advantage for the normal controls, it did not have a similar effect for the amnesia patients. This led to the conclusion that amnesia patients cannot take advantage of strategically provided opportunities to enhance their variable encoding of interitem associations. Instead, it is suggested that the automatic activation of different aspects of items and interitem associations is responsible for the spacing effect in their recall.The ability of amnesia patients to demonstrate enhanced performance on the second occurrence of an item has been investigated extensively in the context of implicit memory tasks. Beneficial effects of repetition have been demonstrated on tasks of perceptual identification (Cermak, Talbot, Chandler,

Benefits of immediate repetition versus long study presentation on memory in amnesia.

“…Like individuals with intact memory, patients with selective amnesia show improved recognition memory following spaced repetition (Cermak, Verfaellie, Lanzoni, Mather, & Chase, 1996; Hillary et al, 2003; Verfaellie, Rajaram, Fossum, & Williams, 2008), and similar findings have been obtained in patients with severe memory impairments in the context of traumatic brain injury (Hillary et al, 2003) and Alzheimer’s disease (Moulin, Perfect, & Jones, 2000). However, in a study by Cermak et al (1996), amnesic patients performed no better following massed repetition than following a single presentation on an immediate recall or recognition test – a finding that contrasts with the pattern seen in control subjects.…”

“…However, in a study by Cermak et al (1996), amnesic patients performed no better following massed repetition than following a single presentation on an immediate recall or recognition test – a finding that contrasts with the pattern seen in control subjects. This finding is surprising in light of the documented benefit associated with a single, long study presentation in patients with severe memory impairment.…”

“…Most importantly, the total presentation time employed in studies that have used a single, long presentation (Hirst et al, 1986; Huppert & Piercy, 1978; Kopelman & Stanhope, 1998) has typically been longer than that in studies that have used massed repetition (Cermak et al, 1996; Hillary et al, 2003). It is possible then that massed repetition may also enhance amnesic performance if the number of massed repetitions were extended to yield a total presentation time equivalent to that used in the long exposure studies.…”

Congenital absence of the mammillary bodies: A novel finding in a well-studied case of developmental amnesia

“…Most striking in the anterograde memory domain, unlike control participants, H.C.'s recognition memory performance does not appear to benefit from semantic encoding of verbal study material, a feature that has been noted in individuals with Korsakoff syndrome in whom mammillary bodies are reduced (Cermak et al, 1974). Her memory retrieval nevertheless benefits from repetition when repeated items in a study list are spaced rather than presented in immediate succession (Green et al, 2014), an effect that has also been demonstrated in Korsakoff patients (Cermak et al, 1996). Areas of cognitive function that had not undergone rigorous investigation in developmental amnesia until H.C. include memory for public events, which was found to be impaired (Rosenbaum et al, 2011;see Maguire et al (2001) for initial findings of intact public event memory in Jon), and the ability to hold information online in working memory, which was intact for famous faces and known vocabulary but impaired when the information was previously novel (Rose et al, 2012;see Allen et al (2014) and Baddeley et al (2011) for complementary evidence in Jon).…”

A Mobile Multimedia Application Inspired by a Spaced Repetition Algorithm for Assistance with Speech and Language Therapy

“…These studies encompass a wide variety of fields including Neuropsychology [25] Occupational Therapy [26], Data Management [27], HCI [28], Psychology [29] [30] and Experimental Child Psychology [31] all of which point to positive effects when utilising SRS to augment existing practices. Perhaps most relevant to the field of SLT is posited in [31], where the author concludes that "results are consistent with the hypothesis that spaced repetition effects in recognition are produced by fundamental memory mechanisms that are operational at a very early age and which undergo little change in development".…”