NCT04088136

Everyday Memory Intervention

Enhancing Older Adults' Everyday Memory Function

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 68 (actual)
• Sponsor: Georgia Institute of Technology · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 70 Years – 85 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Evaluates an intervention designed to improve everyday memory function, contrasting people receiving the intervention with a group that receives traditional memory strategy training.

Detailed description

This project seeks to develop and validate a novel approach to training everyday memory functioning in older adults. The approach (1) trains people to use simple but effective memory skills that have broad applicability in everyday life and (2) shapes a set of skills and habits of mind that will increase the likelihood of effective use of skills and memory aids. It is based on a metacognitive perspective on self-regulation in cognitively demanding situations and informed by recent theories about how suboptimal habit patterns can be altered. The approach has not yet been used in an everyday memory intervention in high-functioning, community-dwelling older adults. The proposed research validates ecological momentary assessment methods to get actual behavioral measures of forgetting in everyday life. It then uses these procedures in a randomized experiment that contrasts the everyday memory intervention group with a traditional memory-strategy training group. The hypothesis is that the everyday memory training intervention will reduce everyday memory errors and memory complaints, whereas the memory strategy training will alter strategy use and memory performance, with little cross-over effect. The hypothesized pattern will establish the explicit benefits of our everyday memory intervention procedures and demonstrate the limitation of standard memory training for that purpose.

Conditions

• Aging

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Everyday Metacognitive Memory Intervention	Provides training in use of techniques and procedures to enhance proactive self-regulatory control over everyday memory demands, including strategies for learning information, planning for meeting everyday goals, and monitoring of efficacy of goal pursuit.
BEHAVIORAL	Memory Strategy Control Intervention	Trains use of standard mnemonic techniques such as imagery and sentence generation for learning new associations and organizational and distinctiveness-based strategies for learning sets of items (e.g., word lists).

Timeline

• Start date: 2021-03-15
• Primary completion: 2021-12-10
• Completion: 2021-12-10
• First posted: 2019-09-12
• Last updated: 2024-05-01
• Results posted: 2024-05-01

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States