Mnemonic strategies in older people: a comparison of errorless and errorful learning

Objective: to compare the efficacy of errorless and errorful learning on memory performance in older people and young adults. Methods: face-name association learning was examined in 18 older people and 16 young controls. Subjects were either prompted to guess the correct name during the presentation of photographs of unknown faces (errorful learning) or were instructed to study the face without guessing (errorless learning). The correct name was given after the presentation of each face in both task conditions. Uncued testing followed immediately after the two study phases and after a 10-minute delay. Results: older subjects had an overall lower memory performance and flatter learning curves compared to the young adults, regardless of task conditions. Also, errorless learning resulted in a higher accuracy than errorful learning, to an equal amount in both groups. Conclusions: older people have difficulty in the encoding stages of face-name association learning, whereas retrieval is relatively unaffected. In addition, the prevention of errors occurring during learning results in a better memory performance, and is perhaps an effective strategy for coping with age-related memory decrement.