Improving Memory in Older Adults by Instructing Themin Professional Actors' Learning Strategies

HELGA NOICE,1* TONY NOICE,2

PASQUALINA PERRIG-CHIELLO3 and WALTER PERRIG3

1Augustana College, USA2Indiana State University, USA3University of Bern, Switzerland

SUMMARY

This study examined a new type of cognitive intervention. For four weeks, participants(ages 65 to 82) were instructed in professional acting techniques, followed by rehearsal andperformance of theatrical scenes. Although the training was not targeted in any way to thetasks used in pre- and post-testing, participants produced signi®cantly higher recall andrecognition scores after the intervention. It is suggested that the cognitive e�ort involved inanalyzing and adopting theatrical characters' motivations (and then experiencing thosecharacters' mental/emotional states during performance) is responsible for the observedimprovement. A secondary strand of this study showed that participants who were givenannotated scripts in which the implied goals of the characters were made explicit demonstratedsigni®cantly faster access to the stored material, as measured by a computer latency task.Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It has been well documented (e.g. Anschutz et al., 1985) that providing older adultswith training in techniques such as the method of loci improves their list learningability. Robertson-Tchabo et al. (1976) demonstrated remarkable gains of 79% after®ve days of intensive training. However, Anschutz et al. (1987) showed that such e�ectsare not necessarily long lasting; three years after initial instruction, participants nolonger used the mnemonic methods which had proven so e�ective immediatelyfollowing training. Converging evidence for this conclusion was o�ered by Scogin andBienias (1988) who found that only 28% of elderly participants continued to usemnemonic devices after initial instruction. Craik and Simon (1980) suggested this lackof long-term e�ectiveness might be due to older adults' tendency to encode material ata super®cial level unless additional techniques to encourage deep processing are taught(see also West, 1989). Another drawback to mnemonic training for older adults is thatmany of them experience di�culties in generating and remembering visual images andassociations (e.g. Paivio, 1971; Poon et al., 1980; Winograd and Simon, 1980).

Furthermore, targeted techniques such as the method of loci do not appear togeneralize to other memory tasks. Verhaeghen et al. (1992) compared 10 groups whohad been assessed using target measures with 10 using non-target measures. The e�ect

CCC 0888±4080/99/040315±14 $17.50Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 2 June 1998

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGYAppl. Cognit. Psychol. 13: 315±328 (1999)

*Correspondence to: Helga Noice, Department of Psychology, Augustana College, Rock Island, IL 61201,USA. E-mail: psnoice@augustana.edu.

Contract grant sponsor: Schweizer Nationalfond

size for the former was 0.64 and for the latter a mere 0.24. The researchers concludedthat `. . . the plasticity associated with mnemonic training appears to be largely speci®cto that training' (p. 249). Thus, many investigators have questioned the usefulness ofmnemonics in helping older individuals cope with their day-to-day memory problems.Nevertheless, when mnemonic techniques are appropriate to the memory problembeing experienced, remarkable gains have been observed (see Bellezza, 1983; andKotler-Cope and Camp, 1990 for a discussion).

Memory-improvement programs that emphasize social interaction appear toprovide additional bene®ts such as accepting current memory performance, gainingmore positive attitudes toward memory, and changing beliefs concerning memorydeterioration (e.g. Best, 1992). Thus, social interaction seems to create an atmospherethat both increases self-esteem and enhances memory performance.

For some time now, a number of researchers have been turning their attention tothe advantages of multifactorial instruction (training that, in addition to teachingspeci®c learning strategies for targeted tasks, includes information on areas such asattentional skills and relaxation). Stigsdotter-Neely and Baeckman (1989) showedthat such training was far more e�ective than simply providing participants with ageneral cognitive activation program (instruction in visual-spatial and problem-solving skills). Participants who had received multifactorial training showed improvedperformance on an immediate free recall task for concrete words, and maintainedthese gains when tested 31

2 years later. However, the control group and the generalcognitive activation group remained at pretest levels over time. In a follow-up study,Stigsdotter-Neely and Baeckman (1993) compared groups receiving 10 weeks ofeither multifactorial training in encoding operations, attention and relaxation, orunifactorial training in encoding operations only. The immediate gain followingtraining was larger for the multifactorial group although identical maintenancee�ects after six months were observed for both groups. Additional evidence for thesuperiority of multifactorial training has been reported by Yesavage and Rose (1983).When, prior to mnemonics instruction, they provided older adults with pre-training inthe form of concentration or relaxation exercises, the older adults' list-learningperformance was enhanced. Thus the addition of other components seems to producegreater e�ects than those produced by mnemonics training alone. (For a discussion ofpretraining e�ects, see Yesavage et al., 1989.)

Therefore, it would appear that the most e�ective type of intervention for healthyolder adults would be one that is performed in a social setting, includes multifactorialinstruction and takes place over a number of sessions. In this paper we describe anew type of intervention study that combines all the above factors: theatre training.Our previous research has indicated that professional actors retain lengthy scriptswith relative ease because they employ an analytical strategy in which memory fortext is merely the byproduct of exploration of character (Noice, 1991; Noice andNoice, 1993, 1994, 1996). This exploration involves a multitude of factors includingelaboration, perspective-taking, plan recognition and causal chaining. Furthermore,the actor retains the dialogue verbatim although the above learning factors have beenshown to generally result in the retention of gist only (e.g. Anderson, 1974; Begg,1971; Bransford et al., 1972; Brewer, 1975; Brewer and Hay, 1984; Cofer et al., 1976;Perfetti and Garson, 1973; Sachs, 1967).

In general, our 10-year investigation of acting expertise has indicated that pro-fessional actors examine dialogue on a word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase basis in

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order to extract maximum information about the characters and/or situation. Forexample, if a man constantly uses whole verb forms such as do not rather than themore colloquial don't, the actor might ask if this is because the character is pedantic,emphatic or just likes to hold the ¯oor as long as possible. This form of investigationapparently helps to ®x the words in memory without actual intentional memorization.Furthermore, the process appears to be enhanced by the type of rehearsal that actorsengage in, always attempting to become fully involved in all the cognitive and emotiveaspects of the dramatic situation as they actively try to a�ect their acting partners'behavior by using the speci®c dialogue. (See Noice and Noice, 1997b for a detaileddiscussion of the actor's process.)

We have shown recently that ®rst-year college students with no theatrical trainingcan retain signi®cantly more dialogue verbatim by actively trying to experience a®ctional encounter between characters than students who intentionally memorize thesame dialogue (Noice and Noice, 1997a). Would this `indirect' learning strategy ofactors also bene®t older adults? Such a result would seem possible because rehearsaland performance, in addition to enhancing memory, involve the participants invibrant social interactions. We, therefore set out to explore this issue by instructing agroup of elderly participants in the rehearsal and performance of theatrical scenes.

The experiment reported here is a preliminary study and, admittedly, raises manyquestions it cannot yet answer. One reason for this is that the study was funded by theSwiss government for only four weeks, and the participants had been recruited inadvance by being promised a training course in professional acting techniques. As aresult, none of them could be used as no-treatment controls. Nevertheless, because ofthe uniqueness of the approach we used, we feel that the results of this preliminarystudy are worth examination at this time.

Since the application of the actors' strategy brings a number of cognitive learningfactors into play in an intense fashion, an additional interest was whether di�erentversions of the strategy would di�erentially e�ect our elderly population. Therefore,the four-week intervention was divided in half. For the ®rst two weeks, the par-ticipants were assigned to one of two groups, with one being provided with scriptscontaining actors' notes on the character's needs (explicit-goal condition) and theother studying only the original dialogue (implicit-goal condition). However, duringthis period, both groups received the same interpretive and movement instructionsfrom the director. Thus this phase of the experiment compared a `weak' and `strong'version of the same strategy rather than two totally di�erent strategies. For theremaining two weeks, all participants used the strong version while working ona second scene, so that they all would have the experience of being trained inprofessional acting techniques prior to performing in front of an audience.

METHOD

Participants

The participants were recruited from the Basler IDA Project, an ongoing inter-disciplinary, longitudinal study on aging (Perrig-Chiello et al., 1996). Thirteen partici-pants (ages 65 to 82) attended the training course in its entirety. In addition, fourothers asked to join the group even though previously made travel plans preventedthem from taking the whole course. These participants were allowed to take the ®rst

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half of the training but, needless to say, they were not involved in the pre- to post-testcomparisons. All participants showed their motivation by arriving on time and neverskipping a session; indeed some reported not feeling well on certain days but said theymade a special e�ort to come because they didn't want to miss anything. Since this wasa positively selected, nonrepresentative sample of older adults, the generalizability ofthe ®ndings is probably limited to a healthy, well-educated population.

Materials and design

Two 5-page theatrical scenes for two characters (one male and one female) werechosen, one from a popular contemporary comedy and one from a serious con-temporary drama. Participants were randomly assigned to either the explicit-goal orimplicit-goal condition. Although the printed scripts were identical for both groups,participants in the explicit-goal condition received scripts with handwritten marginalnotations. These notations made explicit that which was implied by the printeddialogue: the goals and motivations of the characters who used that dialogue.

MEASURES

Pretest measures

Immediate list recallA list of 20 common, unrelated two-syllable nouns was constructed. Each wordwas read by an experimenter at the rate of one word every 3 seconds. Following thepresentation of the list, participants were given a blank sheet of paper and asked towrite down as many of the words as they could remember.

Immediate recognitionA list of 40 common nouns consisting of the 20 target items and 20 distractors waspresented. The target items were in a di�erent order from that used for the recall test.Participants were given a sheet of paper containing 40 rows and two columns with theheadings `yes' and `no'. An experimenter read each word at the rate of three secondsper item and instructed the participants to place an X in the `yes' column if the wordhad been on the original learning list and to place an X in the `no' column if it hadnot.

Delayed recall and recognition testsAfter a 20-minute time lapse, participants were again asked to recall any of the wordsthey could still remember from the original learning list. This was followed by a repeatof the recognition test. In this presentation, however, distractor items were di�erentand the targets were not in the same order as previously presented.

Post-test measures

Five weeks later, the participants were again tested for immediate and delayed freerecall and recognition, using the identical methods of presentation.

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Measures for the between-group comparison during the ®rst half of the study

Although the main interest was in the overall e�ectiveness of the intervention asmeasured by the pre- and post-tests, a secondary consideration concerned the com-parison between the e�ectiveness of weak and strong versions of the actors' strategyemployed during the ®rst half of the study. This issue was addressed by two additionalmeasures.

Cued recall testThis test was given after three sessions. The participants were not yet performingcompletely from memory, but still holding their scripts and referring to them whennecessary. Even though the training emphasized acting techniques rather thanmemory issues, the participants necessarily used the to-be-learned material in order toapply the acting instruction. To test retention, each participant was given a scriptcontaining only the lines of dialogue of the `other' character, and had to ®ll in his orher responses in the blank spaces provided. This task is quite di�erent from the usualcued recall task in which the participant is asked to reproduce the remainder of anitem that is partially presented. For example, in one part of our task, in response to aseven-word dialogue cue, the participant had to supply a 32-word dialogue reply.Thus, this type of task could more properly be described as a free recall task withsupplied prompts rather than standard cued recall. Any idea unit that was recalledwith word-for-word accuracy or contained only very minor changes (such as acontraction instead of a whole verb form or a single substitution of an exact synonymwithin an entire utterance) was counted as acceptable verbatim.

Accessibility measureTo determine the ease with which participants could access words from their script,we used a probe latency task as employed by Oliver and Ericsson (1986). We selecteda total of 24 probes consisting of 4 words each. Each 4-word phrase had occurred onlyonce in the studied scene. Half of the probes were from the beginning of a sentenceand half from the middle.

Each participant sat side by side with an experimenter in front of an IBM computerwith a 17-inch VGA monitor. The control program, which presented the stimuli andrecorded the response times, was written using Micro-Experimental Laboratory(MEL) software (Schneider, 1988). First, a ®xation point appeared on the screenfor 500 ms which was replaced by a probe. The probes were not in the order in whichthey appeared in the original script. The participant's task was to complete the lineof dialogue immediately following the probe by speaking the remainder aloud within15 seconds.

PROCEDURE

Description of training

All training took place in two large, adjoining rooms (each approximately 200 ft�100 ft). This set-up provided su�cient space for all participants to work together inone room or to be divided into two separate groups. The course met every Monday,Wednesday and Thursday for a total of 11 sessions. (One week contained a holiday.)

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Week 1Participants were randomly assigned to either the explicit-goal or implicit-goalcondition. Those in the explicit-goals condition received the scripts with the marginalnotations describing that character's goals when using those lines. These participantswere asked to form male/female pairs and instructed to go through the script by ®rstlooking down to `acquire' the ®rst phrase and then to look directly into their partners'eyes and use this phrase to obtain the speci®ed goal. It was explained to theparticipants that they should really try to obtain the goal from the other person andthat they would probably be able to tell how well they were succeeding by monitoringthe other person's expression. They were instructed to proceed through the entire5-page scene in this manner, phrase by phrase (never reading with their eyes on thepage but always noting the next phrase, then using it `tactically' with their partnerbefore glancing down to acquire the following phrase). Throughout the process, thedirector went from pair to pair, spending a few minutes with each and encouragingthem to really try to obtain the goal from the other person.

The implicit-goal group (in the adjoining room) was also divided into pairs andasked to rehearse the script with their partners. The experimenters went from coupleto couple and observed this process but did not advise or coach the participants.However, it was obvious from the participants' use of the dialogue that they werealso trying to a�ect each other with whatever goals were implicit in the dialogue. Forexample, in a segment of the scene in which the characters were arguing, it wasapparent from the participants' demeanor that they were challenging each other, themost immediately obvious interpretation of those lines.

The remainder of the ®rst week was devoted to a variety of tasks designed to getthe scene ready for performance. Sometimes the pairs worked simultaneously intheir corners of the rooms and other times they were subjected to performance con-ditions by doing the scene, one pair at a time, while the rest of the group became the`audience' and sat in front of them and watched. Also, the director `blocked' thescenes, instructing each participant how, when and why to move. Participants in bothgroups received exactly the same type of instruction. The only di�erence was that theexplicit-goal group was speci®cally told not to attempt to memorize the lines but toactively use the words to obtain their goals, whereas the implicit-goals group wasgiven no particular instruction in this regard.

Week 2The director continued supervising all participants as in Week 1 working with eachcouple in turn to bring them up to performance level. During this week, all partici-pants performed a surprise, written cued recall task. Later the same day, the experi-menter brought them one at a time into the adjoining room to perform the computerreaction time task while the director worked with the remaining participants.

Week 3Each set of participants performed the comedy scene in front of the others one lasttime (except for the performance for an invited audience at the end of the inter-vention). After the break, all participants received the new scene (from the seriousdrama). This time all participants received scripts with the goals speci®ed by marginalnotations, and the director speci®cally thanked those in the implicit-goals group fortheir help in the experiment in the ®rst two weeks in which learning strategies were

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compared. He then explained that all participants now would use the actors' learningstrategy, describing it in detail. In each session during this third week, the participantsworked on the scene either simultaneously, with each pair in a separate corner (andthe director going from group to group to supervise) or individually `on stage' withthe others looking on as an audience (while the director `blocked' the scene). At thebeginning of each session, the participants were instructed in new `acting tools', suchas improvization (performing the same situation using their own words) or subtextualexploration (saying exactly the same words but using them to communicate radicallydi�erent meanings).

Week 4Work continued as in Week 3. In addition to scene rehearsal, new `acting tools'were added at each session. These included the Alexander Technique (a method ofphysically relaxing the actor's body to make it into a more responsive instrument)and exercises in concentration and sensory awareness. During the ®nal session of thisweek, both scenes were performed by the various actors before an invited audience.Also, all participants were given a surprise post-test, as described under Measures.During the co�ee break, there was a brief graduation ceremony with diplomas andgifts.

RESULTS

Pre- to post-test improvements

For all statistical analyses, the rejection level was set at 0.05, unless otherwise noted.The immediate and delayed recall and recognition test data obtained during the pre-and post-test were subjected to several analyses. The ®rst comparison involved the pre-and post-test immediate free recall scores between the explicit-goal and the implicit-goal group. (If any between-group di�erences were to emerge, they were expected to bevery small since all participants had been treated identically in every respect duringthe last two weeks and treated identically for most aspects of the training during the®rst two weeks.) Results showed that the groups did not di�er signi®cantly; thereforethe data were collapsed across that factor. However, both groups did exhibit signi®-cant increases in free recall performance (average improvement � 2.00 items),t(12) � 2.73. A signi®cant gain was also observed for the delayed recall task (averageimprovement � 2.15 items), t(12) � 3.74. These data are shown in Table 1.

Also shown in Table 1 are the recognition data, tabulated for d0 scores, hits, andfalse alarms. A repeated measures t-test performed on the d0 scores indicated moreaccurate recognition performance on the post-test than the pre-test for both theimmediate test, t(12) � 2.56, and the delayed test t(12) � 5.73. In summary, actingtraining yielded signi®cant improvement in immediate and delayed recall andrecognition performance after four weeks of non-targeted training in acting skills.

Retention and accessibility results during the ®rst half of training

To make meaningful comparisons betweens the explicit- and implicit-goals groupsduring the ®rst two weeks, it was necessary to ®rst determine whether the participantsassigned to those groups di�ered in terms of their recall performance on the pre-testgiven a week before the intervention. We computed the total number of items recalled

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by each participant and then transformed each score into a percentage. The meanrecall performance of the explicit-goals group (M � 40.56%, SD � 7.68) did notdi�er signi®cantly from that of the implicit-goals group (M � 45.00%, SD � 12.25),t(15) � ÿ0.908, p � 0.38.

We next assessed the recognition performance by computing a d0 score for eachparticipant. Once again, no signi®cant di�erences were observed between the explicit-goals group (M � 2.83) and the implicit-goals group (M � 2.27), t(15) � 0.968,p � 0.35. These results indicated that if any disparity between the groups' memoryperformance was found during training, it could not be attributed to di�erencesexisting at the onset of the experiment.

Cued recall resultsThe mean percentage of idea units recalled with nearly word-for-word accuracy wascalculated. While the explicit-goals group recalled 87.08% (SD � 12.40) of the script,the implicit-goals group only recalled 79.08% (SD � 20 99); however, this di�erencewas not statistically signi®cant, t(15) � 0.971, p � 0.347.

Accessibility of text (computer task)Because one participant failed to understand the task and consequently did notcomply with the experimental instructions, her data were eliminated from the scoring.The response time data for the remaining participants are shown in Table 2.

The reaction times for correct retrievals were submitted to a mixed analysis ofvariance (ANOVA) with group (explicit-goals versus implicit-goals) as between-subjects factor and location (beginning versus middle of sentence) as within-subjectsfactors.

Most importantly, there was a signi®cant main e�ect of group which indicatedthat the explicit-goals group had faster access to their parts (M � 2.36 s) than theimplicit-goals group (M � 3.65 s), F(1,14) � 9.92, MSe � 1,328,260.13, p5 0.01.Not surprisingly, participants found it more di�cult to successfully retrieve a linewhen given a prompt from the middle of a line (M � 3.57 s), than the beginning ofa line (M � 2.45 s), F(1,14) � 13.96, MSE � 695,696.40, p5 0.01. The interactionbetween group and location of the prompt was marginally signi®cant, F(1,14) � 5.26,MSe � 705,802.29, p � 0.0504. An analysis of simple main e�ects indicated that

Table 1. Pre- to post-test comparisons

Pre-test Post-test Di�erence

Free recallImmediate 9.08 11.08 �2.00Delayed 8.23 10.39 �2.15

Immediate recognitionHits 17.00 19.08 �2.08False alarms 2.62 1.92 ÿ0.70d0 scores 2.87 4.13 �1.26

Delayed recognitionHits 17.39 19.23 �1.84False alarms 1.62 0.62 ÿ1.0d 0 scores 3.43 5.25 �1.82

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prompts from the middle of a line resulted in signi®cantly longer latencies, but onlyfor participants of the implicit-goals group, F(1,14) � 13.880, p5 0.01.

DISCUSSION

This study set out to investigate two main issues. The ®rst was whether olderadults' active experiencing of the mental, emotional and physical actions of dramaticcharacters would result in demonstrable cognitive improvement. The second waswhether the participants would be able to retain and perform lengthy text andaccompanying movement patterns exactly as given.

In regard to the ®rst issue, there was an overall signi®cant increase between pre-and post-testing despite the fact that nothing in the actors' strategy (which involvesidentifying with the character's motivations when using the scripted words) shouldbe of any strategic bene®t to the recall or recognition of lists of unrelated words. Thissuggests that the demanding mental activity involved in analyzing and experiencinganother's thoughts and feelings tends to enhance general cognitive functioning.

It might be speculated that our pre- to post-test results were due simply to repeatedtesting and not to the intervention itself. However, our sample was drawn from anongoing (since 1993) longitudinal study of 442 people. This project included a numberof previous interventions that did use no-treatment controls. None of these experi-ments produced signi®cant e�ects at post-test for no-treatment controls (see Perrig-Chiello et al., 1996). For example, one recent intervention provided memory andreattribution training to 46 elderly participants (Kaiser, 1995). Half of them wereassigned to a training program and half to a no-treatment control. Except for onemeasure (immediate recognition), no signi®cant di�erences were found between theexperimental and control groups in terms of overall cognitive functioning or psycho-logical well-being. More importantly for our purposes, controls did not show signi®-cant increases in the repeat test (free recall was 71.25% at pre-test and 73.75% at post-test, a non-signi®cant di�erence.) Since this (and other previous studies) did notproduce signi®cant increases with repeated testing of no-treatment controls, it suggeststhat this factor would not explain our results. Of course, a large-scale test with a

Table 2. Average response times to 4-word probes as a function of strategy and locationof prompt

Condition Location of promptBeginning Middle

M SD M SD

Explicit goalsMen 2.19 0.37 2.69 0.33Women 2.07 0.22 2.53 0.28Mean: 2.12 2.60

Implicit goalsMen 3.51 2.22 6.03 1.03Women 2.22 0.31 3.41 0.31Mean: 2.77 4.53

Note: Numbers refer to response latency in seconds.

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control group is needed to make this a de®nite assertion, but since these previousexperiments used the identical measures (recall and recognition) with the identicalpopulation (members of the IDA group), we feel justi®ed in suggesting that our®ndings were due to treatment e�ects.

There is a question as to whether our results represent remediation of declineor what Schaie (1996) referred to as `. . . the attainment of new performance levels(perhaps closer to the limits of their reserve capacity) in individuals who had notexperienced any cognitive decline' (p. 173). The evidence suggests that our results beinterpreted as a reversal of declining mental ability. Because the participants werepart of a long-term memory study, baseline data (collected at the start of the IDAproject in 1993) was available for 9 out of 13 of the participants in our pre±post-testcomparison. Their average 1993 score for free recall was 11 items out of 20. On our1996 pre-test, taken the week before the intervention started, these same participantsrecalled only 8.42 items. These ®gures indicate a de®nite decline in the tested abilitiesover the three years. Yet, after just four weeks of training in theatre techniques, thisdecline was completely reversed; free recall now reached 10.89. Furthermore, theseaverages were not due to a few exceptional cases; 7 out of 9 participants showed adecrease from 1993 to pre-test, and 6 of these 9 showed an increase at post-test.

The second issue (the ability to retain and perform long, complex material) was alsosupported by the data. After three training sessions, in which the emphasis was not onmemory but on emotionally honest performing, participants recalled 83% of the textalmost word for word. Using a slightly less stringent measure which allowed forminor paraphrasing, this rose to 92%. Furthermore, all participants learned thegestures and movements that accompanied the words, precisely as taught by thedirector. These two feats demonstrate that older adults are indeed capable of learningnew skills and, as a result, of acquiring large portions of verbal material verbatim inthe relatively little time spent on the text during the sessions. (The participants weren'trequired to work on their roles at home, but were encouraged to do so if they hadtime. Before each session, the participants were given a log and asked to enter theamount of homework. They all confessed that they had done virtually no workbetween sessions; therefore, they had learned the dialogue during the few hours of `in-class' rehearsal.)

A secondary issue concerned the bene®ts of relating the text to provided goalstatements. For the ®rst half of the intervention (in which the participants wereassigned to either an explicit-goal or an implicit-goal condition), both groups retainedan equal amount of material. The failure to show di�erences in recall perform-ance may have been due to insu�cient power resulting from the small size of n.However, the participants in the goal-speci®ed condition, when presented with briefcomputer prompts, were able to access the correct responses signi®cantly faster. Evenwith randomly selected prompts taken from anywhere in the script, participants in thiscondition were able to retrieve the correct response in about 2.37 s. Oliver andEricsson (1986) used this same task to test professional actors in a Shakespeareancompany during a period in which they were actively performing the play, following8-weeks of rehearsal. Even after this long period of preparation and ongoing nightlyactivation, these professionals were only able to access the correct response 1.67 safter a prompt. While prompts from the beginning of a speech were retrieved morequickly by both our groups regardless of length, there was an overall advantage forthe goal-speci®ed group. Thus, a learning strategy that stressed relating the dialogue

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to a goal statement provided more e�cient access to stored information, suggestingthat goal information may have served as an organizing device. It has frequentlybeen found that information central to the attainment of a goal is better remembered(e.g. Abbott et al., 1985; Black and Bower, 1980; Bower, 1982; Chiesi et al., 1979;Lichtenstein and Brewer, 1989; Owens et al., 1979; Trabasso and van den Broek,1985; van den Broek, 1988; van den Broek and Trabasso, 1986). Furthermore, beingsupplied with the goal that the character is pursuing while speaking that section ofdialogue demands explanation (and hence elaboration) as to why the character saidthose words in order to achieve that speci®c goal.

Indeed while the strong (explicit-goals) version of the strategy resulted in increasedaccessibility, the excellent overall performance we observed with our participants (inboth the explicit and implicit groups) may be due to the fact that theatrical directionforced them to deeply process the text. It has been suggested that the poor memoryperformance of older adults may be the result of their not spontaneously engaging indeep processing (Craik and Simon, 1980).

An additional factor might have contributed to the overall success of thisintervention. It has been shown (e.g. Erickson, 1978) that elderly don't relate well tolaboratory situations. Therefore, an advantage of the type of procedure we employedwas that rehearsal and performance were `real-life' situations and eliminated theappearance of `arti®cial' laboratory training.

The entire question of why theatrical training was so e�ective with our participantswould seem to have a twofold answer. The ®rst lies in the nature of the elaborativeencoding involved, including inference generation, perspective taking and assignmentof causality. Since there is no way to apply the `actor's process' without indulging inthose redundant operations, deep encoding by our participants was not optionalbut absolutely mandatory. It has previously been shown that older adults don'tspontaneously elaborate material in a redundant fashion, unless they are speci®callyinstructed to do so (e.g. Bower and Karlin, 1974; Craik, 1984; Kotler-Cope andCamp, 1990; Smith and Winograd, 1978).

The second element involves the remediation of disuse. If the failure to employcomplex cognitions results in declining mental e�ciency, then the employment ofthem to an extraordinarily high degree should have the opposite e�ect. The type oftheatrical training described here demands that the participant actively put himself orherself in a character's position, thus experiencing the ongoing mental life of thatcharacter while interacting with and attempting to in¯uence others. The mental e�ortrequired by this task was probably far greater than the participants were used toexperiencing, yet the training took place in a `fun' atmosphere where the e�ort wasexpended not only willingly but enthusiastically.

To sum up, it appears that the type of intervention we are proposing involves anumber of factors already identi®ed as being of great remedial value. The com-bination of deep encoding during preparation and extraordinarily e�ortful processingduring rehearsal and performance might well explain the pre- to post-test enhance-ment on non-targeted memory tasks found here. Undoubtedly, the facilitative e�ectsof socializing were also involved; the experimenters frequently observed the partici-pants playfully interacting with one another during breaks, openly revealing theirfeelings in the same way that their assigned characters did during the play. Thus,theatrical training involves not only cognitive factors, but emotive, social and physio-logical ones as well (see Herrmann and Searleman, 1990, and Herrmann, 1996 for a

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discussion of the bene®ts of a multimodal approach to the treatment of older adults'memory problems).

For reasons given in the introduction, the employment of a control group was notpossible. In future experiments, after recruiting participants for a course in theatricaltraining, half of them could be put on a waiting-list but included in the original pre-and post-test sessions. In this way, the waiting-list participants would serve as no-treatment controls, yet eventually receive the promised training.

A number of other issues remain. Since these participants all lived independently,would the results hold for those living in retirement homes? Also, since this experi-ment used male/female pairs, would the e�ects hold for single-sex groups? Althoughthe results of this intervention were certainly promising, the small scale of this studyprevented systematic exploration of the boundaries of its e�ectiveness. Therefore,long-term investigation with large numbers of participants seems warranted.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Part of the investigation was supported by a grant from the Schweizer Nationalfond.We are particularly grateful to the sta� of the Kantonspital for use of their facilities.Special thanks are extended to Professor Dr H. B. Staehelin, Geriatric UniversityClinic of Basel, and to Professor Steiner and the sta� of the Psychology Department ofthe University of Basel for their kind cooperation in carrying out this project. We alsowish to thank Vera Kling, Heidi Ziegler-Raub and Franciska Krings for theirassistance in administering this workshop; Joshua Williams and Alexis LePere fortheir help in preparing the stimuli, and Beat Meier for providing the computerprogram to collect reaction times. We are grateful to Kathy Pezdek and two anony-mous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. Portions of this paperwere presented at the Society of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition(SARMAC II), Toronto, Canada, July, 1997.

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