Learning by observation and guidance in patients with Alzheimer's dementia

How people suffering from dementia can be taught new motor skills for everyday household activities is an important but relatively unexplored area of research. Previous studies have demonstrated intact implicit learning abilities in patients with Alzheimer dementia (AD) on computerized motor-learning tasks and everyday activities, but explicit training strategies have been found to be beneficial in AD as well. The aim of the present study was to compare two explicit training methods, i.e. observational learning and learning by guidance, and an implicit training method in patients with AD and healthy controls. All three types of training methods resulted in statistically significant learning. However, while improvement from baseline was similar in both groups, the absolute performance of the patients in the explicit training methods was well below that of the controls. The modest success of the explicit training methods and the slightly better results achieved with the observation method should be investigated further in studies of the acquisition of everyday activities.