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Do you often forget carrying your keys or umbrella with you while stepping out of your house? A simple memory trick may help!

Imagining an action that connects two objects may help people overcome certain kinds of memory problems, a study suggests.

Thinking about an action between two objects – like an umbrella being lodged in the door lock – and a potential consequence, such as not being able to lock the door, could help people improve their memory for relationships with other objects, researchers said.

The strategy – termed “unitization” – could be used in personalised memory rehabilitation to help older adults and those with amnesia bypass gaps in their abilities, said Jennifer Ryan, senior scientist at Baycrests Rotman Research Institute in Canada.

“Previous research has shown that imagining two objects fusing into one will help people work around these memory deficits; but our work demonstrated that understanding the relationship between the two items is also important,” said Ryan, also a professor at the University of Toronto.

“We know that cognitive function is impaired during ageing and this strategy could be one workaround for minor memory problems, depending on what you need to achieve,” she said.

The study evaluated the performance of 80 healthy older adults (between the ages of 61 and 88) on a memory task. The group was first trained and tested on the task to gather initial results.

They were then either taught one of the three individual features of unitization (fusion, motion, action/consequence) or the overall unitization strategy.

After learning these new approaches, participants were tested again to see if this helped their performance.

Older adults trained to improve their memory using only the action/consequence feature of unitization saw the greatest memory improvements.

“We are trying to understand what is important to unitization and what people need to learn in order to benefit,” said Ryan.

“There is no single strategy that will fix your memory, but one method may be more be suitable than another,” she said.

Excerpted from an article in Memory and Cognition Journal dated Aug 2017