Fading Cues

It is well known that it is easier to recognise something as familiar than to freely recall it out of your head. Many people would have some difficulty recalling the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1980. Yet most of those people would have no difficult in saying that the name ‘Geoffrey Howe’ sounds familiar in that context
We can use this relative strength of recognition over free recall to help people with memory problems learn new bits of knowledge.

A lady I knew found it most distressing that she could not recall the names of her two granddaughters even though she had been told dozens of times. What we did was to teach one name at a time. We got a photo of the youngest, Peggy, and wrote the name PEGGY on a piece of paper underneath it.
“Who is this?” we asked. “Peggy” was the reply. This was simple. So we removed one letter from the name underneath the photo. It now said
PEG_Y

Again we asked “Who is this?” and the lady was able to reply “It’s Peggy”.
So we kept on removing one letter from the name under the photo, like this:
P_G_Y
__G_Y
____Y
and each time we asked the lady was able to get her granddaughter’s name correctly. When she was able to name the photo correctly as Peggy we used the method of Spaced Retrieval to make the memory stronger. We then went on and re-taught her the name of her second granddaughter.

This method can be used with people who have serious memory difficulties. The focus is on helping the person to make a correct retrieval from their memory. It is this that seems to be so effective in helping lay down new memories.