Introduction. The aim of this study was to employ the word-picture paradigm to examine the effectiveness of combined pictorial\nillustrations and sentences as strong contextual cues. The experiment details the performance of word recall in healthy older adults\n(HOA) and mild Alzheimer�s disease (AD). The researchers enhanced the words� recall with word-picture condition and when the\npair was associated with a sentence contextualizing the two items. Method. The sample was composed of 18 HOA and 18 people\nwith mild AD. Participants memorized 15 pairs of words under word-word and word-picture conditions, with and without a\nsentence context. In the paired-associate test, the first item of the pair was read aloud by participants and used to elicit retrieval of\nthe associated item. Results. The findings suggest that both HOA and mild-AD pictures improved item recall compared to word\ncondition such as sentences which further enabled item recall. Additionally, the HOA group performs better than the mild-AD\ngroup in all conditions. Conclusions. Word-picture and sentence context strengthen the encoding in the explicit memory task,\nboth in HOA and mild AD. These results open a potential window to improve the memory for verbalized instructions and\nrestore sequential abilities in everyday life, such as brushing one�s teeth, fastening one�s pants, or drying one�s hands.
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