ABSTRACT
As every chapter in this book can attest to, Larry Jacoby has had a profound effect on our understanding and approach to the study of human memory. However, no chronology of Larry’s work would be complete without a look at an aspect of his research that has fostered a growing body of applied experiments focused on training and improving memory function. Much to the great fortune of the first author ( Jennings), she has had the opportunity to be a part of that line of research from its inception and has been able to watch it grow within the cognitive aging field. This chapter will examine some of that work with an emphasis on a previously unpublished study in which the repetition-lag training technique was used with individuals who have mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We will first introduce the early experiments that led to the MCI study, then interpret the results within the context of those original findings combined with more recent data obtained from individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and culminate in a discussion of several important questions that need to be addressed for this work to move forward in the future.
