A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

healthy individuals as mentioned above (see section 2.8.5.1). The investigation
involved photographs of people unfamiliar to the participants and they learned to
pair these photographs with surnames randomly taken from a phonebook. As
with healthy participants the investigation indicated that the pre-exposure
technique alongside the imagery technique facilitated significantly greater
learning and recall. Kalla, Downes and van den Broek (2001) also used
surnames from a phonebook and photographs of people unfamiliar to the
participants. Their study evaluated ‘errorless’ learning versus ‘errorful’ learning
using the pre-exposure technique. Additionally, they required the participants to
make judgments about each of the people in the photographs, (for example, if
they looked honest, diligent, friendly, honest etc.). Their results indicated that
like Downes et al.’s, (1997) investigation, the pre-exposure technique was a
necessary component to learning because it provided a staggered learning
process where the image of a person’s face was first established before the
associative component (in this case a name) was superimposed. Additionally,
they assert that in order that this pre-exposure technique be beneficial to the
learning, it must be used in conjunction with an efficient mnemonic strategy,
which this study used evaluative judgments by participants. Another study
employed the use of foreign vocabulary in evaluating the ability of a severely
amnesic participant in learning new vocabulary, incorporating recognition and
recall of the words (Van der Linden, Cornil, Meulemans, Ivanoiu and Salmon,
2001). The results indicated that despite the severity of his memory impairment,
the participant was able to acquire this vocabulary and his learning ability was
similar to control participants. A number of other studies evaluated the ability of
people with memory impairment due to dementia in learning new vocabulary /
information. Arkin, Rose and Hopper (2000) claimed evidence of implicit and
explicit learning with dementia patients as well as semantic activation with premorbidly
learned knowledge. Swales and Johnson (1992) had also reported that
their participant with semantic dementia was successful at re-acquiring
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