Teaching Picture Recall Among Older Adults: A Comparison of Two Verbal Behavior Protocols

As the number of people age 65 years or older continues to grow, the need for better designed gerontology programs aimed at addressing the normal memory changes associated with aging, which may lead to treatments designed to offset the effects Alzheimer\u27s (Peterson & Wendt, 1990; Rosen et al., 2002), is also increasing. Therefore, this study compared and systematically replicated two previous studies, Dixon et al. (2011) and Sautter et al. (2011) to investigate if older adults without dementia could learn to recall names of pictures of famous people using problem solving techniques which involve tact training and response prompting versus echoic prompting and immediate intraverbal questions. Results from two participants who completed the study indicate the problem solving techniques can increase picture recall to near 100% levels. One participant also was able to recall 89% of the stimuli that were learned using the problem solving protocol at a two week follow-up