A COMPARISON OF 2 TRAINING METHODS FOR TEACHING NAME-FACE ASSOCIATIONS TO ELDERLY SUBJECTS WITH SELF-REPORTED MEMORY LOSS

Eight community-dwelling elderly subjects with self-reported memory lo ss volunteered to participate in a training study to improve memory fo r name-face associations. Two training conditions were compared in a m ultiple N intervention design. Two sets of four target faces were rota ted across conditions. In the mnemonic imagery training condition, the subject was asked to associate the verbal elaboration of the first an d last name with the face using visual imagery provided by the experim enter. In the video condition, the subject watched a brief video tape of the person whose name and face was to be remembered. Training was c onducted in two sessions per day, twice a week for approximately an ho ur each day. Both techniques were effective and there were no systemat ic differences in the efficiency of these two techniques. All subjects reached the criteria of accurately providing all eight names (four le arned with the imagery technique and four learned with the mnemonic te chnique) after a one half hour delay and seven of the eight subjects r ecalled all eight names after a 2- to 5-day delay. In addition, recall of the names and faces was tested for five of the subjects in a simul ated real life meeting. Although there was some decrement in performan ce, the subjects were able to generalize the training to a novel situa tion. There were no systematic differences in the subjects' ability to recall the names learned with the imagery technique and names learned with the video technique in the simulated real life meeting.