Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37027, USA.
Anesthesiology. 2012 Oct;117(4):772-9. doi: 10.1097/ALN.0b013e31826a4b02.
Anesthesiologists deliver large quantities of verbal information to patients during preoperative teaching. Basic principles of cognitive psychology dictate that much of this information is likely to be forgotten. Exactly how much and what type of information can be retained and recalled remains an open question.
With Institutional Review Board approval, 98 healthy, educated volunteers viewed a brief video containing a preoperative explanation of anesthetic options and instructions. Subjects were then asked to engage in free and cued recall of information from the video, and to complete a recognition task. We developed a coding scheme to objectively score the free and cued recall tasks for the quantity of information recalled relative to the quantity presented in the video. Data are presented as descriptive statistics.
Subjects spontaneously recalled less than 25% of the information presented. Providing retrieval cues greatly enhanced recall: Subjects recalled 67%, on average, of the material queried in the cued recall task. Performance was even stronger on the multiple-choice test (83% of items correctly answered), indicating that the information was initially encoded. The category of information that was consistently least-remembered was presurgical medication instructions.
Under realistic conditions for recall, most medical instruction given to patients will not be recalled, even if it is initially encoded. Given the limits of short-term memory, clinicians should carefully consider their patterns of information giving. Improvement of memory performance with cues for retrieval indicates that providing printed instructions for later review may be beneficial.
麻醉师在术前教学时向患者提供大量口头信息。认知心理学的基本原则表明，这些信息很可能会被遗忘。确切地说，有多少信息可以被保留和回忆，这仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。
在机构审查委员会批准的情况下，98 名健康、受过教育的志愿者观看了一段简短的视频，其中包含有关麻醉选择和说明的术前解释。然后，要求受试者自由回忆和提示回忆视频中的信息，并完成识别任务。我们开发了一种编码方案，客观地对自由和提示回忆任务进行评分，以评估相对于视频中呈现的信息量的回忆量。数据以描述性统计呈现。
受试者自发回忆的信息量不到 25%。提供检索线索极大地增强了回忆能力：受试者平均回忆起提示回忆任务中查询的材料的 67%。多项选择测试的表现甚至更强（83%的项目回答正确），表明信息最初被编码。始终最不容易被记住的信息类别是术前用药说明。
在实际的回忆条件下，即使最初被编码，大多数向患者提供的医学指导也不会被回忆起来。鉴于短期记忆的局限性，临床医生应仔细考虑他们的信息提供模式。使用检索线索来提高记忆表现表明，提供用于以后审查的打印说明可能是有益的。
