Six older adults with probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD) were trained to recall a name-face association using the spaced-retrieval method. We administered six training sessions over a two-week period. On each trial, participants selected a target photograph and stated the target name, from eight other photographs, at increasingly longer retention intervals. Results yielded a positive effect of spaced-retrieval training for name-face recognition. All participants were able to select the target photograph and state the target’s name for longer periods of time within and across training sessions. A live person transfer task was administered to determine whether the name-face association, trained by spaced-retrieval, would transfer to a live person. The live person target was the same target that was used in the spaced-retrieval training sessions. Half of the subjects were able to call the live person by the correct name. These data provide initial evidence that spaced-retrieval training can aid older adults with probable AD in recall of a name-face association and transfer that association to an actual person
