| Adjusted rehearsal training (Camp, 1989) is a schedule for distributing practice trials across time on the basis of the performance of the learner. Longer delays follow correct retrievals of information. Shorter delays follow incorrect retrievals of information. The goal of adjusted rehearsal training is long-term retention of information that will be useful in the everyday life of a person with cognitive impairment, for example older adults with dementia. I compared adjusted rehearsal training to several other schedules of practice on three different tasks to determine whether adjusted rehearsal is more effective than other schedules of distributed practice. Baddeley and Wilson (1994) have proposed that people with explicit memory impairment like that seen with various forms of dementia benefit from practice that reduces errors during training. Therefore, I also tested whether adjusted rehearsal reduces training errors. Participants practiced recalling the names of pills, matching pills to names, or recalling sequential patterns using several schedules of practice. I found no evidence that adjusted rehearsal training produces long-term retention of information more often than other schedules of distributed practice or that adjusted rehearsal reduces errors during training. Participants with higher scores on one portion of the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test (Brandt, 1991) were more likely to show long-term retention with training (Experiment 3). This suggests that distributed practice alone may promote long-term retention of information as well as adjusted rehearsal training, at least by those who are less cognitively impaired. |
