Abstract

Memory problems are a hallmark symptom of dementia. Although memory problems can take various forms, anomia is a common type of cognitive deficit that involves difficulty recalling names of people or objects. The purpose of the current study was to test the effectiveness of two interventions designed to improve the ability to recall the names of objects. Two elderly individuals with memory impairment participated in this study. Baseline involved identifying low and high probability images, with low-probability (low-p) items serving as the target images during the intervention phases. Two interventions were compared using an alternating treatments design. The first intervention, Recognition-to-Recall, involved a series of high-p recognition tasks followed by one low-p recall task. The second intervention, Recall-to-Recall, involved a series of high-p recall tasks followed by one low-p recall task. Results indicated that the two interventions greatly improved recall for the names of low-p target objects, although the Recall-to-Recall intervention appeared to be somewhat more effective for both participants. Results indicate that this intervention shows promise as a means for improving recall for names of objects in persons with mild to moderate cognitive impairment.

Advisor

Jeffrey A. Buchanan

Committee Member

Don J. Ebel

Committee Member

Karla A. Lassonde

Date of Degree

2011

Language

english

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

College

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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In Copyright