Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 50, Issue 3 P134-P140, Copyright © 1995 by The Gerontological Society of America
Effects of multifactorial memory training in old age: generalizability across tasks and individuals
AS Neely and L Backman
Section of Psychology, Stockholm Gerontology Research Center, Sweden.
This study examined the generalizability of gains following multifactorial
memory training in healthy older adults across tasks and individuals; 46
subjects were randomly assigned to either a control group or to a
multifactorial training group (encoding operations, attentional functions,
relaxation). The criterion task was recall of concrete words, and there
were three transfer tasks: recall of objects, recall of subject-performed
tasks, and recall of abstract words. Results indicated that multifactorial
training gave rise to performance gains in the criterion task that were
sustained after 6 months. Transfer of gains and maintenance of transfer
were observed for object recall only, indicating a restricted range of
generalizability. Pretraining scores alone predicted posttraining scores,
whereas age, education, and level of global cognitive functioning
(Mini-Mental State Examination) did not contribute reliably to the
magnitude of training- related gains.
