Recollection Training and Transfer Effects in Older Adults: Successful Use of a Repetition-Lag Procedure

Abstract

We examined an approach aimed at training consciously-controlled recollection, introduced by Jennings and Jacoby (2003) , for its ability to replicate and generalize. A continuous recognition task, requiring recollection to identify the occurrence of repeated items over gradually increasing lag intervals (number of intervening items between the first and second presentation of a repeated word), was given to a group of older adults twice a week for three weeks. Pre-and-post training performance was assessed on multiple measures and compared with a recognition practice and no contact control group. Recollection training proved successful; accurate identification of repeated items increased across a lag interval of 2 to 18 intervening items. Post-training gains following recollection training were found on n-back, self-ordered pointing, source discrimination and digit symbol substitution, but not with reading span or the CVLT-II. No changes were identified in the other groups. Gains from recollection training seem to transfer successfully in older adults.

High-confidence memory errors in old age: The roles of monitoring and binding processes

“…Under these conditions the demand on memory monitoring processes increases (Burgess & Shallice, 1996;Henson, Shallice, & Dolan, 1999;Moscovitch & Winocur, 2002). Furthermore, a number of studies have shown that older adults can be trained with the repetition-lag procedure by implementing a gradual increase in the repetition lag and the corresponding demand on recollection-based processing (Bissig & Lustig, 2007;Jennings & Jacoby, 2003;Jennings, Webster, Kleykamp, & Dagenbach, 2005). Our results speak to these findings by demonstrating that the slope for rearranged pairs in older adults was reliably different from zero.…”

A theoretical framework for the study of adult cognitive plasticity.

“…Training-induced performance gains decrease with adult age, and they generalize to some extent to tasks in which the trained strategy can be applied (e.g., Ball et al, 2002;Baltes, DittmannKohli, & Kliegl, 1986;Baltes & Kliegl, 1992;Baltes & Willis, 1982;Craik et al, 2007;Kliegl, Smith, & Baltes, 1989;Stigsdotter Neely & Bäckman, 1995;Stuss et al, 2007;Willis, Blieszner, & Baltes, 1981;Wood & Pratt, 1987;Yesavage, 1984; for reviews, see Baltes & Lindenberger, 1988;Barnett & Ceci, 2002;Noack et al, 2009; for meta-analysis, see Verhaeghen, Marcoen, & Goossens, 1992). More recent studies have administered practice on tasks targeting a variety of cognitive processes, such as working memory Dahlin, Stigsdotter Neely, Larsson, Bäckman, & Nyberg, 2008;Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, & Perrig, 2008;Li et al, 2008;Olesen, Westerberg, & Klingberg, 2004), executive functions (Bherer et al, 2005;Karbach & Kray, 2009;Kramer, Larish, & Strayer, 1995), recollection (Jennings, Webster, Kleykamp, & Dagenbach, 2005), interference resolution (Persson & Reuter-Lorenz, 2008), or a combination of processes from various domains of functioning (Basak, Boot, Voss, & Kramer, 2008;Mahncke, Connor, et al, 2006). Like the strategybased studies, these practice-oriented studies have revealed improvements on practiced tasks in both early and late adulthood.…”

Transfer after process-based object-location memory training in healthy older adults.

“…Although both interventions led to large improvements in the trained tasks, there was little evidence for transfer. For the recollection intervention, previously found transfer effects to an untrained word list recognition task and a working memory task (Jennings et al, 2005) could not be confirmed in a later study with a larger sample size (Stamenova et al, 2014). For the spatial navigation intervention, Lövdén et al (2012) also observed no transfer effects across 14 outcome tasks measuring a wide range of cognitive abilities both at post-training and at four-month follow-up.…”

“…Our findings stand out from the few prior studies on process-based episodic memory training interventions in healthy older adults (Jennings et al, 2005;Lövdén et al, 2012;Stamenova et al, 2014) which have generally failed to demonstrate transfer to untrained cognitive tasks, including those assessing episodic memory and reasoning. An advantage of our study was that we evaluated transfer effects on the level of cognitive abilities rather than with single cognitive tasks.…”

“…To our knowledge, only two process-based training interventions targeting episodic memory processes in healthy older adults have been investigated: one practicing recollection processes in word list recognition (Jennings & Jacoby, 2003;Jennings, Webster, Kleykamp, & Dagenbach, 2005;Stamenova et al, 2014) and another practicing spatial navigation (Lövdén et al, 2012). Although both interventions led to large improvements in the trained tasks, there was little evidence for transfer.…”