Alleviated forgetting of a learned contingency in 8-week-old infants.

To investigate retention by 8-wk-old infants (N?=?24) after lengthy intervals, the authors first determined that infants of this age reliably learned an operant contingency in 2 training sessions and evidenced no retention of it 14 days later (Exp I). To determine whether the memory of the contingency was permanently inaccessible or whether forgetting could be alleviated by a prior cueing procedure known to facilitate retrieval in older infants, a "reactivation" treatment was administered 17 days after training was completed, and cued recall was examined 24 hrs later (Exp II). Control groups received either no reactivation treatment prior to the retention test or a reactivation treatment but no prior training. Experimental Ss showed little or no forgetting, but Ss in the 2 control groups responded at their pretraining baseline rates during the long-term retention test. These data challenge the general assumption of deficits in memory processing by 8-wk-olds and demonstrate that memories acquired either prior to or during a period of major neurological and behavioral reorganization can be maintained through that period. (42 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Power motive reliability as a function of retest instructions.

When 70 undergraduates were instructed to try to reinstate their original state of mind and write the same TAT stories, or when they were instructed not to worry about whether their stories were similar to or different from those written before, test–retest reliability of need for power was substantially higher than the levels usually found for TAT motive and approach levels found with objective personality tests. Under instructions to write different stories, Ss showed chance-level reliability. Results are discussed in terms of bringing implicit test instructions and self-instructions under experimental control. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of experimental arousal of the affiliation motive on thematic apperception.

"The purpose of this study was to develop a method of scoring thematic apperception stories to measure strength of motivation for social acceptance, or n Affiliation. Imaginative stories were written in response to pictures by two groups of male Ss under experimental conditions designed to differ in the degree to which motivation to be accepted and liked by others would be aroused." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental and population comparisons of taxonomic and thematic organization in free recall.

Assessed taxonomic and thematic clustering in free recall in 240 7- and 10-yr-olds from Black and White and low- and middle-SES backgrounds. Materials were pictures that were cross classifiable by taxonomic and thematic categories. A free study condition, in which Ss studied the pictures any way they wished, tested the hypothesis that taxonomic clustering would increase with age and thematic clustering would decrease with age. This condition also tested A. R. Jensen's (see record 1969-09740-001) prediction of population differences in clustering and recall. Two conditions were also included that determined whether constraining Ss to sort taxonomically or thematically during the study period would raise recall and clustering. Results for the free study condition indicate that recall and taxonomic clustering increased with age but thematic clustering was low for both ages. This pattern of performance did not vary with ethnicity or SES. The constrained taxonomic condition raised taxonomic clustering for all children but had no effect on recall for either age group. The constrained thematic condition generally raised thematic clustering for all Ss, but the beneficial effect of the constrained thematic condition on recall was limited to the 10-yr-olds. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Forgetting in traumatic brain-injured patients with persistent memory impairment.

The rate of forgetting words, pictures, and designs was assessed in a subsample of individuals with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) who showed disproportionately severe persistent memory impairment. Relative to control Ss, the patients had an abnormally fast rate of forgetting pictures, but not words or designs. TBI patients with persistent memory impairment may process some forms of information inefficiently but do not appear to have a fundamental deficit in memory consolidation. This finding may be related to the tendency of TBI patients to less readily apply encoding strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Restricted use of success cues in retrieval during posthypnotic amnesia.

Evaluated memory for successful and unsuccessful responses to hypnotic suggestions in partially amnesic Ss and in those Ss with normal forgetting. Two analyses (278 undergraduates) demonstrated that highly hypnotizable Ss experiencing partial posthypnotic amnesia tended to show no selective recall for their successes or failures during amnesia, whereas the remainder of the Ss showed definite selective recall of hypnotic success posthypnotically. These findings support F. J. Evans and J. F. Kihlstrom's (see record 1974-06307-001) hypothesis that posthypnotic amnesia involves a disruption of memory organization and suggest that the phenomenon may be mediated by a restriction in the use of normally employed retrieval cues. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociable effects of conscious emotion regulation strategies on explicit and implicit memory.

The authors manipulated emotion regulation strategies at encoding and administered explicit and implicit memory tests. In Experiment 1, participants used reappraisal to enhance and decrease the personal relevance of unpleasant and neutral pictures. In Experiment 2, decrease cues were replaced with suppress cues that directed participants to inhibit emotion-expressive behavior. Across experiments, using reappraisal to enhance the personal relevance of pictures improved free recall. By contrast, attempting to suppress emotional displays tended to impair recall, especially compared to the enhance condition. Using reappraisal to decrease the personal relevance of pictures had different effects depending on picture type. Paired with unpleasant pictures, the decrease cue tended to improve recall. Paired with neutral stimuli, the decrease cue tended to impair recall. Emotion regulation did not affect perceptual priming. Results highlight dissociable effects of emotion regulation on explicit and implicit memory, as well as dissociations between regulation strategies with respect to explicit memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of depression on structural aspects of the recall of prose.

Investigated depressed patients' memory for stories. This indicated that although normal Ss showed particularly good recall for units central to the structure of the story, this did not hold for depressed Ss. In contrast, effects of centrality were comparable in high- and low-IQ Ss and effects of imageability of story units were comparable in both depressed and normal Ss. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that depressed patients do not use structure to organize stories when encoding them. A failure to identify central aspects of material and selectively recall them is likely to be a handicap to everyday functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rates of forgetting in organic amnesia following temporal lobe, diencephalic, or frontal lobe lesions.

Forgetting rates were examined in patients with diencephalic, temporal lobe, or frontal lesions. No significant differences were found in short-term forgetting of verbal and nonverbal material; in recognition memory for pictures, words, or designs over delays between 1 min and 20 or 30 min; or on a measure of explicit cued recall for words, calculated in terms of the process dissociation procedure. Significantly faster forgetting was found in the diencephalic and the temporal lobe groups in the free recall of pictures of objects, although there was no difference between these 2 groups. It is concluded that the major deficit in amnesic patients' memory processes is in the initial acquisition of information but that there is a subtler deficit in retention over specific delays, detectable only on measures of free recall. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Monitoring, activation, and disinhibition: Effects of white noise masking on spoken thought.

2experiments with 20 male and 20 female adults each and 2 replications tested the hypothesis that preventing a person from hearing himself as he speaks results in disinhibition of communication thought. White noise masking (WNM) was used to prevent S from hearing himself as he spoke. TAT stories and Holtzman Inkblot Test (HIT) responses were the main dependent variables. Under WNM, TAT stories showed more impulse-dominated themes and fewer defensively modulated stories than under normal conditions (N). The effect was exaggerated when WNM followed N. Female Ss produced more color responses on HIT under WNM than under N, an effect that was augmented when WNM followed N. Under WNM, physical properties of voices changed lawfully: pitch and intensity rose and phonation time increased, but the increase was greater for spontaneous speech than for read speech. WNM resulted in a disinhibition of drive-related fantasies that had already been primed. Interfering with the monitoring of one's vocal activity by itself does not necessarily result in impairment of thought organization or of reality attunement. The results have bearing upon a theory of monitoring, activation of impulse-relevant content, and disinhibition of spoken language. (28 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influence of socioeconomic status on children's classification and free recall.

29 kindergarten and 29 1st-grade children were divided into 3 SES levels based on their parents' education level (college, high school, or less than high school) and given 2 sort/recall tasks on sets of pictures that could be organized on the basis of familiar taxonomic or complementary relations. On 1 task, Ss sorted pictures into identical groupings on 2 consecutive trials prior to recall; on the other task, Ss sorted the pictures only once. It was found that Ss from college-educated families were more apt to sort items on the basis of taxonomic relations than Ss from high-school-educated and less-than-high-school-educated families. However, there were no significant differences in levels of recall or clustering. Results indicate that young children from low-SES homes will demonstrate high levels of memory performance when tasks are constructed so that they are familiar with the relations among the to-be-remembered items. The appropriateness of distinguishing children's cognition in terms of A. R. Jensen's (see record 1969-09740-001) Level I vs Level II dichotomy is discussed in light of recent research examining the role of knowledge base on children's memory functioning. (45 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arousal and cortisol interact in modulating memory consolidation in healthy young men.

Animal studies indicate that adrenal glucocorticoids enhance memory consolidation while impairing memory retrieval. In humans, beneficial effects on consolidation have been observed infrequently. In the current double-blind study, subjects (N = 29) received placebo or cortisol (30 mg) 10 min before viewing emotionally arousing or neutral pictures. Cortisol treatment had no effects on immediate recall. In the 24-hr delayed recall condition, cortisol led to an enhanced emotional memory facilitation because of decreased neutral and increased emotional memory recall. No effects of cortisol treatment were observed for recognition memory or mood. Results support the notion that glucocorticoids specifically enhance the consolidation of emotional material. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Immediate and delayed recall of words and pictures.

Examined free and serial recall of words and pictures associates in 3 experiments with 156 Ss. In immediate free recall, presentation of pictorial material increased only the secondary memory component of recall, relative to conditions involving presentation of verbal materials. No such facilitation occurred in immediate serial recall. In delayed recall tests, negative recency effects were obtained only for verbal materials, in both free and serial recall. Recency effects were either nonnegative or positive with pictures as to-be-remembered material. Results are discussed in terms of the locus of word-picture differences and the adequacy of verbal memory model explanations for them. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ipsative behavioral variability and the quality of thematic apperceptive measurement of the achievement motive.

Ipsative behavioral variability is defined as change in the behavior of an individual in a constant environment. Through computer simulation of the dynamics of action (J. W. Atkinson and D. Birch; 1970, 1978), one may deduce that increases in ipsative variability in the expression of motivational imagery written in response to equally cued TAT pictures will increase the construct validity of that imagery regardless of the internal consistency reliability that remains. Empirical support for this hypothesis is offered by the finding that TAT need for achievement (nAch), measured in 4 stories written in response to weakly cued pictures, showed improved construct validity for 61 male undergraduates who were high rather than low in ipsative variability. TAT nAch showed significant construct validity for the high-variability group even though the internal consistency of this group's motive measure was –2.229. Findings disconfirm the general applicability of classical reliability theory to thematic apperceptive measures. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eliciting cryptomnesia: Unconscious plagiarism in a puzzle task.

Investigated cryptomnesia (unconscious plagiarism) and source memory using a word-search puzzle task in 3 experiments. Ss first alternated with a "computer partner" in locating words from 4 puzzles. They then attempted to recall their previously generated items as well as to locate additional new words. Substantially more plagiarism was committed in these tasks than was observed in a study by A. S. Brown and D. R. Murphy (1989), in which Ss generated category exemplars. Manipulations of retention interval (Exp 1) and degree of encoding (Exps 2a and 2b) reliably influenced plagiarism rates. Source confusions from a modified recognition memory task (Exp 3) were used as the basis for a unitary relative strength model to explain both source and occurrence (item) forgetting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective reading: Attention to the "unattended" lines.

Previous research on selective reading indicates that upon direct questioning Ss are usually unable to recall words that appear in irrelevant lines. In 3 experiments with male 6th graders (n = 24) and college freshmen (n = 31), a procedure was developed to examine the influence of the unattended lines on memory for the words in attended lines in selective reading. In each study, q of the Ss were given a set of selective reading passages to be read aloud. In the irrelevant lines of each passage were wrong answers to the questions which followed that story. The remainder of the Ss in each experiment read control passages without irrelevant lines. Results show that although Ss in the selective reading condition could not recall the words in the irrelevant lines, their answers to the questions following each passage were influenced by that "unattended" material. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory organization during children's repeated recall.

Presented a list of categorically related words to 20 2nd graders and 20 6th graders in a memory test. Multiple recall tests followed the initial presentation of words so that changes in memory organization could be assessed over recall attempts. Ss in both grades remembered many new words on later recall trials that they had not remembered on Trial 1. The proportions of new words recalled and the retrieval characteristics of these words were similar in both grades. Younger Ss, however, forgot many words during repeated recall, and older Ss did not. Different patterns of forgetting were correlated with different types of organizational strategies. Second graders recalled words in a sequential, rote manner with few transformations or rearrangements of words. Sixth graders, on the other hand, actively constructed larger categories or chunks of words over recall attempts. The spontaneous reconstruction of remembered information by 6th graders is interpreted as a manifestation of constructive memory-monitoring skills. Some potential advantages of a repeated recall paradigm for developmental research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recall and stem-completion priming have different electrophysiological correlates and are modified differentially by directed forgetting.

The notion that different aspects of memory are assessed by explicit and implicit memory tests was supported by behavioral and electrophysiological results. In a study–test procedure, 24 Ss were instructed to remember some words and to forget other words. Free recall and cued recall were better for words associated with the remember instruction, whereas directed forgetting did not influence stem completion (an implicit memory test). Event-related brain potentials elicited during study differed as a function of subsequent memory performance for free recall and cued recall, but not for stem completion. These results implicate encoding differences in the distinction between the 2 types of memory test. Factors governing whether explicit retrieval affects performance on an implicit memory test, mechanisms that may underlie directed-forgetting effects, and the importance of electrophysiological correlates of memory are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional factors in the forgetting of word associations.

Systematic explorations of the hypothesis that emotional factors influence memory has eventuated in both acceptance and rejection of the premise. The present study is patterned after the experimental model used by Rapaport et al. The modification introduced concerns the nature of the stimulus words; herein the "neutral" and "emotional" words are equated with regard to frequency of usage. The dependent variable included an evaluation of the emotionality of each word by Es, by Ss, and S's GRS. Factor analysis of the data revealed 2 factors affecting recall: emotionality and "response variability" (between Ss and between testing sessions) suggesting that "the forgetting of word associations is a function of both emotional and non-emotional determinants." From Psyc Abstracts 36:01:3CL99L. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)