Improving Prospective Memory in Persons With Parkinson Disease: A Randomized Controlled Trial.
Erin R Foster, Mark A McDaniel, Peter G Rendell
PMID 28176547WHAT IT FOUND
Teaching people with Parkinson's to visualize specific 'when and what' cues improved memory for one-off tasks more than simple repetition.
Both strategies helped, but the visualization method showed a stronger effect on difficult, non-repeated tasks.
Key findings
01Implementation intentions produced a larger improvement than rehearsal for non-repeated tasks, though this difference was marginally significant.
02Both encoding strategies improved performance overall, with greater gains seen for event-based cues compared to time-based cues.
03There was no significant difference between the two strategies for repeated tasks.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The advantage of Implementation Intentions over Rehearsal for non-repeated tasks was only marginally significant, meaning the difference could be due to chance. The study was conducted in a laboratory setting using a computer game, so it is unclear if these benefits transfer to real-world daily tasks. There was no control group that received no strategy training at the second session, so some improvement may be due to practice effects, although the authors argue this is unlikely to explain the pattern of results. The sample size may have been insufficient to detect smaller differences between the two active strategies.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume Implementation Intentions are superior to simple Rehearsal for all tasks. The significant benefit was only for non-repeated tasks and was statistically marginal. For repeated daily tasks, simple rehearsal was just as effective.