Errorless learning and spaced retrieval: How do these methods fare in healthy and clinical populations?

Abstract

While errorless learning and spaced retrieval have both proved effective in helping many patients with acquired brain injury (ABI) and dementia learn novel information, it is not clear which of these principles we should apply to target treatment most effectively. To address this issue we conducted a systematic comparison of these principles in three experiments, comparing their effectiveness in healthy controls (N = 60), patients with ABI (N = 30), and patients with dementia (N = 15). Participants were asked to learn face–name associations, and the relative effectiveness of the principles over and above trial-and-error learning was investigated. The results were remarkably consistent across experiments: Both errorless learning and spaced retrieval produced greater accuracy in name recall than did trial-and-error learning, but recall under conditions of spaced retrieval was significantly better than that under errorless learning. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest that spaced retrieval may be the stronger memory rehabilitation principle when it comes to learning face–name associations in people with mild to moderate memory impairment.

Keywords:

• Errorless learning
• Spaced retrieval
• Memory rehabilitation
• Acquired brain injury
• Dementia

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Sarah Black and Anne Homer for their help in recruiting participants.

Notes

¹Greebles are computer-generated novel objects designed as a control set for faces and have been used in various studies as stimuli in studies of object and face recognition.

²This analysis was based on errors committed under both standard and dual-task conditions in combination.

³In the planning of this study the original intention was to include other individual and combined learning techniques; hence the reason that six name lists were developed and used.