Effectiveness of a Visual Imagery Training Program to Improve Prospective Memory in Older Adults with and without Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Randomized Controlled Study

ABSTRACT

Prospective memory (PM) problems in aging and, to a greater extent, in mild cognitive impairment (MCI), compromise functional independence. This study examined the effectiveness of a cognitive training program based on visual imagery to improve PM among older adults with and without MCI. Participants were older adults, 24 with MCI and 24 cognitively healthy (HOA). Half of them (12 MCI and 12 HOA) were randomly assigned to the PM training program, the other half to the no-training control group. All participants also completed a pre- and post-test evaluation, including neuropsychological tests, questionnaires, and the Ecological Test of Prospective Memory (TEMP). There was no significant effect of the intervention on the TEMP total, event-based or time-based scores for either the MCI or HOA groups. However, the trained MCI group committed fewer false alarms (i.e., more efficient identification of prospective cues) in the event-based condition of the TEMP at post-test. On the other hand, all trained participants performed better than control participants on retrospective memory tests, which suggests that visual imagery-based training is more effective to improve retrospective memory than PM. Possible explanations for these results are explored.

KEYWORDS:

• Prospective memory
• mild cognitive impairment
• aging
• cognitive intervention
• visual imagery

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Manon Fleurent, MSc, the neurologists, geriatricians, and nurses at the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal and the Institut Universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal for their help in recruiting participants, Sonia Marcone, PhD, and Roxane Langlois, PhD, for their help with test administration, as well as all the participants who volunteered to take part in the study. The authors would also like to thank Hugues Leduc, MSc, for his suggestions for the statistical analysis, Karen Grislis, for her help reviewing the manuscript, and Mylène Duchesneau, who draw the pictures used in the PM training program according to MJP’s original ideas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Alzheimer Society of Canada (I.R., M.J.P. and S.J.). and a scholarship from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Santé (A.L.).