Cognitive rehabilitation for memory-impaired individuals : Optimizing the training procedure based on the two-factor model

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The method of vanishing cues (MVC) was deemed as an errorless and effortful training procedure and thus was expected to afford the optimal learning environment to memory-impaired individuals. Nevertheless, our previous studies revealed that the MVC was less effective than errorless learning without fading. In Study 1, we revised the MVC in such a way that the number of vanishing stages was increased using perceptually degraded stimuli as vanishing cues. Amnesic patients were asked to learn category-exemplar pairs under four different study conditions. Errorless learning proved to be more beneficial than errorful learning, replicating previous findings. In contrast, the benefit from effort emerged only when the task provided little environmental support and demanded self-initiated retrieval. The revised MVC was found to emphasize gradual fading and error elimination while maintaining effortful processes involved. In Study 2, we introduced the distinction between perceptual and conceptua … More l processing to the delineation of effective intervention for memory-impaired individuals. Patients with Alzheimer's disease learned a list of words under each of four study conditions that were designed by crossing the error (errorless vs. errorful) and the feature (perceptual vs. conceptual) factors. The errorless and conceptual condition led to better recall than did the remaining three conditions. In addition to error elimination, the emphasizing of conceptual encoding was likely to contribute to the optimal learning by dementia patients. In Study 3, patients with Korsakoff's syndrome and nonamnesic controls were required to learn object names with or without verbally generating their actions and with or without actually performing the generated actions. Verbal generation with or without performing actions facilitated recognition, whereas recall advantage was found only in the verbal generation-plus performance condition. A comparable memory advantage of self-performed tasks was confirmed for the amnesic and controls groups. Less