Participants and recruitment
cognitive impairment, memory complaints, dementia, psychiatric, memory disorder, neurological illness
RECRUITMENT
Participants were recruited from four community elderly care centres affiliated with a non-government organisation in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Before the recruitment of the participants, four centres were assigned to either the semantic-based memory-encoding strategy (SmeS) experimental group or the cognitive stimulation (CS) control group. Potential participants were then identified by staff at the centres using the following selection criteria. Once the potential participants were identified, the research team approached the participants and their family members to explain the project and obtain written informed consent.The selected participants were aged 60 or over and had no previous psychiatric or memory disorder history or other neurological illness, were able to communicate effectively, had voluntarily provided consent to participate in the study and had a family member who could participate in the study. The participants had a Mini-Mental State Examination score greater than or equal to 21, a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment according to the Petersen criteria, which includes memory complaints corroborated by an informant, essentially preserved general cognitive function, largely intact functional activities, and no diagnosis of dementia as shown by a clinical dementia rating of 0.5 [A researcher blinded to the group allocation was responsible for obtaining written consent. The participant allocation process is shown in the flowchart in 