Cortisol variation in humans affects memory for emotionally laden and neutral information.

In a test of the effects of cortisol on emotional memory, 90 men were orally administered placebo or 20 or 40 mg cortisol and presented with emotionally arousing and neutral stimuli. On memory tests administered within 1 hr of stimulus presentation, cortisol elevations caused a reduction in the number of errors committed on free-recall tasks. Two evenings later, when cortisol levels were no longer manipulated, inverted-U quadratic trends were found for recognition memory tasks, reflecting memory facilitation in the 20-mg group for both negative and neutral information. Results suggest that the effects of cortisol on memory do not differ substantially for emotional and neutral information. The study provides evidence of beneficial effects of acute cortisol elevations on explicit memory in humans. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implications des processus d'imagerie mentale dans le déficit du codage imagé des informations verbales au cours du vieillissement normal.

Our study specifies the contributions of image generation and image maintenance processes occurring at the time of imaginal coding of verbal information in memory during normal aging. The memory capacities of 19 young adults (average age of 24 years) and 19 older adults (average age of 75 years) were assessed using recall tasks according to the imagery value of the stimuli to learn. The mental visual imagery capacities are assessed using tasks of image generation and temporary storage of mental imagery. The variance analysis indicates a more important decrease with age of the concretness effect. The major contribution of our study rests on the fact that the decline with age of dual coding of verbal information in memory would result primarily from the decline of image maintenance capacities and from a slowdown in image generation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Coordinating information from perception and working memory.

Individuals must often coordinate information in working memory with information from perception. The demands of coordination have been analyzed in terms of the cost to switch attention. Coordination is considered in terms of the organization of control processes. Ss in 4 experiments performed list-processing tasks that sometimes required alternation between sets of items that were held in working memory or were currently displayed. Exp 1 demonstrated that performance was slower and more error-prone when alternating between sets than when reporting a single set. On alternation tasks, latency varied with serial position, indicating that Ss paused between pairs of responses. In Exp 2, this serial position function was observed for tasks requiring alternation between sets of information in the same modality (memory or perception). Exps 3 and 4 demonstrate that this effect depends on the requirement to generate a new sequence of responses. A model of control processes for coordination is developed and tested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word-frequency and phonological-neighborhood effects on verbal short-term memory.

Immediate memory span and maximal articulation rate were assessed for word sets differing in frequency, word-neighborhood size, and average word-neighborhood frequency. Memory span was greater for high- than low-frequency words, greater for words from large than small phonological neighborhoods, and greater for words from high- than low-frequency phonological neighborhoods. Maximal articulation rate was also facilitated by word frequency, phonological-neighborhood size, and neighborhood frequency. In a final study all 3 lexical variables were found to influence the recall outcome for individual words. These effects of phonological-word neighborhood on memory performance suggest that phonological information in long-term memory plays an active role in recall in short-term-memory tasks, and they present a challenge to current theories of short-term memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual perception and aging.

Reviews a series of studies on aging and its effect on perceptual processing and working memory capacity for visual stimuli. Specifically, studies on luminance, color, motion, texture, and symmetry processing are reported. Furthermore, experiments on the capacity to retain size and spatial frequency information are also discussed. The general conclusion is that there are a number of perceptual abilities that diminish with age. However, the extent of these deficits will depend on the complexity of the neural circuitry involved for processing a given task. This is also true for visual working memory where no evidence of loss due to aging is demonstrated for processing low-level visual information, when individual differences in sensory input are compensated for. It is concluded that perceptual processing deficits due to aging (like working memory) will become evident when the computational load reaches a certain level of complexity (larger or more complex network) even if the tasks remain cognitively simple. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Level-of-processing effects in conceptually driven implicit tasks.

Level of processing (LOP) has often been shown to affect performance on explicit memory tasks, but not on implicit memory tasks. These findings have been explained by the processing framework (H. J. Roediger et al, 1989): Study–test transfer depends on the overlap between the type of processing at study and at test. This framework predicts that conceptually driven implicit (CDI) memory tasks should be affected by an LOP manipulation because the study and test tasks share common conceptual processes. This prediction was investigated with 2 CDI tasks: general knowledge retrieval and category exemplar generation. LOP effects were found in both tasks, thus supporting the processing framework. Category exemplar priming declined rapidly over a 90-min interval, and elaborative study conditions enhanced the duration of priming relative to physical conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Explicit and implicit memory for rotating objects.

Although both the object and the observer often move in natural environments, the effect of motion on visual object recognition has not been well documented. The authors examined the effect of a reversal in the direction of rotation on both explicit and implicit memory for novel, 3-dimensional objects. Participants viewed a series of continuously rotating objects and later made either an old-new recognition judgment or a symmetric-asymmetric decision. For both tasks, memory for rotating objects was impaired when the direction of rotation was reversed at test. These results demonstrate that dynamic information can play a role in visual object recognition and suggest that object representations can encode spatiotemporal information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When does generation enhance memory for location?

Generation is thought to enhance both item-specific and relational processing of generated targets as compared with read words (M. A. McDaniel & P. J. Waddill, 1990). Generation facilitates encoding of the cue-target relation and sometimes boosts encoding of relations across list items. Of interest is whether generation can also increase the encoding of target-location associations. Because the literature on this point is mixed, 3 procedural differences between 2 studies (E. J. Marsh, G. Edelman, & G. H. Bower, 2001; N. W. Mulligan, 2004) were identified and manipulated. A positive generation effect was found for location memory, but this effect was reduced when subjects wrote down the study words and when the filler task involved generation. Generation can enhance location memory in addition to item memory but only if the experimental parameters do not interfere with the processing benefits of generation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prospective memory in Parkinson disease across laboratory and self-reported everyday performance.

Prospective memory is a complex cognitive construct ubiquitous in everyday life that is thought to sometimes rely on executive skills commonly affected by Parkinson’s disease (PD). The present study investigated the effect of PD on prospective memory tasks with varying demand on executive control processes, namely on the amount of strategic attentional monitoring required for intention retrieval. Individuals with PD but without dementia and healthy adults performed laboratory event-based prospective memory tasks that varied in whether strategic attentional monitoring (nonfocal condition) or spontaneous processes (focal condition) were primarily involved in intention retrieval. Participants also completed a questionnaire rating their frequency of prospective memory failures in everyday life for both self-cued and environment-cued tasks. PD participants performed worse than non-PD participants in the nonfocal, but not focal, condition of the laboratory task. They also reported more everyday failures than non-PD participants for self-cued, but not environment-cued, prospective memory tasks. Thus, nondemented individuals with PD are preferentially impaired on prospective memory tasks for which higher levels of executive control are needed to support intention retrieval. This pattern is consistent across laboratory and reported real-world performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generation and context memory.

Generation enhances memory for occurrence but may not enhance other aspects of memory. The present study further delineates the negative generation effect in context memory reported in N. W. Mulligan (2004). First, the negative generation effect occurred for perceptual attributes of the target item (its color and font) but not for extratarget aspects of context (location and background color). Second, nonvisual generation tasks with either semantic or nonsemantic generation rules (antonym and rhyme generation, respectively) produced the same pattern of results. In contrast, a visual (or data-driven) generation task (letter transposition) did not disrupt context memory for color. Third, generating nonwords produced no effect on item memory but persisted in producing a negative effect on context memory for target attributes, implying that (a) the negative generation effect in context memory is not mediated by semantic encoding, and (b) the negative effect on context memory can be dissociated from the positive effect on item memory. The results are interpreted in terms of the processing account of generation. The original, perceptual-conceptual version of this account is too narrow, but a modified processing account, based on a more generic visual versus nonvisual processing distinction, accommodates the results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Exploring developmental differences in visual short-term memory and working memory.

Although visuospatial short-term memory tasks have been found to engage more executive resources than do their phonological counterparts, it remains unclear whether this is due to intrinsic differences between the tasks or differences in participants’ experience with them. The authors found 11-year-olds’ performances on both visual short-term and working memory tasks to be more greatly impaired by an executive suppression task (random number generation) than were those of 8-year-olds. Similar findings with adults (e.g., Kane & Engle, 2000) suggest that the imposition of a suppression task may have overloaded the older children’s executive resources, which would otherwise be used for deploying strategies for performing the primary tasks. Conversely, the younger children, who probably never had the capacity or know-how to engage these facilitative strategies in the first place, performed more poorly in the single task condition but were less affected in the dual task condition. These findings suggest that differences in the children’s ability to deploy task-relevant strategy are likely to account for at least part of the executive resource requirements of visual memory tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory for “what”, “where”, and “when” information in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).

The present study examined working memory for what, where, and when information in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) using a computerized task. In Experiment 1, monkeys completed three delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) tasks: (1) identity DMTS, (2) spatial DMTS, and (3) temporal DMTS. In Experiment 2, the identity and spatial tasks were combined so that monkeys had to report both what and where information about an event. In Experiment 3, the identity, spatial, and temporal tasks were combined to examine what-where-when memory integration. The rhesus monkeys reported all three components of the events, and there was some evidence suggesting that these components were integrated in working memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Role of serial order in the irrelevant speech effect: Tests of the changing-state hypothesis.

The effects of irrelevant speech were examined on a range of memory tasks. A missing-item task, which relied on a nonserial strategy for recall, proved less sensitive to the effects of irrelevant speech than one calling on memory for serial order. The finding that the effect of irrelevant speech both on a recognition task and on a paired-associates task was modified significantly by articulatory suppression further suggested that memory for serial order is the dominant feature of these tasks and that it renders them vulnerable to disruption by irrelevant speech. Taken together, the results of the experimental series support the notion that tasks involving memory for serial order are particularly susceptible to disruption by irrelevant speech. These and other findings converge on the notion that interference with information processing by irrelevant sound is based on similarity of process rather than similarity of content. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Converging evidence that visuospatial cognition is more age-sensitive than verbal cognition.

In 3 separate experiments, the same samples of young and older adults were tested on verbal and visuospatial processing speed tasks, verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks, and verbal and visuospatial paired-associates learning tasks. In Experiment 1, older adults were generally slower than young adults on all speeded tasks, but age-related slowing was much more pronounced on visuospatial tasks than on verbal tasks. In Experiment 2, older adults showed smaller memory spans than young adults in general, but memory for locations showed a greater age difference than memory for letters. In Experiment 3, older adults had greater difficulty learning novel information than young adults overall, but older adults showed greater deficits learning visuospatial than verbal information. Taken together, the differential deficits observed on both speeded and unspeeded tasks strongly suggest that visuospatial cognition is generally more affected by aging than verbal cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of enactment in implicit and explicit memory

Enactment during the encoding of simple imperatives has been found to improve substantially performance on conceptually driven explicit-memory tests. In two experiments the effect of this manipulation on a conceptually driven implicit test (category association) was studied. A conceptually driven explicit test (free recall) was also included. In Experiment one three different study conditions (enactment with real objects, reading, and generation) were considered. In Experiment two there were two study conditions (enactment with imaginary objects and reading). Compared to reading, generation was found to improve the performance on both free recall and category association, whereas enactment affected free recall only. In a final experiment subjects imagined that they performed the tasks, and this manipulation was found to improve the memory performance on both tests. Taken together, this pattern of results is interpreted as suggesting that free recall and category association have a process in common that is sensitive to semantic processing at study (promoted by generation and imagery, but not by enactment), and that free recall involves a retrieval process in addition that is facilitated by a rich encoding environment (provided by enactment).     

Direct and indirect tests of memory for category exemplars in young and older adults.

Young and older adults were compared on direct (cued recall) and indirect (exemplar generation) tests of memory for category members. Because category names served as cues in both tasks, amount of retrieval support was constant across tasks. Although older adults produced fewer category members in cued recall, priming of category exemplars in the generation task did not vary with age. These results suggest that age constancy in priming tasks does not depend on physical similarity between study materials and retrieval cues provided at test and point to the importance of deliberate recollection as a factor in determining the extent of age differences in memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Direct and indirect measures of memory for modality in young and older adults.

In 2 experiments, young and older adults demonstrated modality effects of similar magnitude in perceptual identification tasks. That is, both young and older adults demonstrated more repetition priming when study and test modalities matched than when they were different, suggesting that contextual information was equally available across age. However, when asked explicitly to retrieve modality information, older adults were less accurate than young adults. These results constitute evidence for a dissociation between direct and indirect measures of memory for modality information. They call into question hypotheses that memory impairment in old age is due to deficient encoding of contextual information and challenge current accounts of modality effects in repetition priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Remember-Know and source memory instructions can qualitatively change old-new recognition accuracy: The modality-match effect in recognition memory.

Remember-Know (RK) and source memory tasks were designed to elucidate processes underlying memory retrieval. As part of more complex judgments, both tests produce a measure of old-new recognition, which is typically treated as equivalent to that derived from a standard recognition task. The present study demonstrates, however, that recognition accuracy can be qualitatively changed by a RK or source-retrieval orientation. Visual and auditory presentations of words were varied at encoding and at test. The memory test was either a standard (old-new) recognition test, the RK test, or a source (modality) test. No effect of modality match was found on standard recognition. However, recognition accuracy in the RK and modality tests was greater when study and test modalities matched—a result obtained for both 1-step (e.g., R, K, or new?) and 2-step (e.g., old-new decision followed by RK decision for items judged old) versions of these tests. Thus, the RK and source (modality) memory procedures produced a measure of old-new recognition that was qualitatively different than standard recognition, having a greater sensitivity to perceptual information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relationship between memory and judgment depends on whether the judgment task is memory-based or on-line.

Five alternative information processing models that relate memory for evidence to judgments based on the evidence are identified in the current social cognition literature: independent processing, availability, biased retrieval, biased encoding, and incongruity-biased encoding. A distinction between 2 types of judgment tasks, memory-based vs online, is introduced and is related to the 5 process models. In 3 experiments, using memory-based tasks where the availability model described Ss' thinking, direct correlations between memory and judgment measures were obtained. In a 4th experiment, using online tasks where any of the remaining 4 process models may apply, prediction of the memory–judgment relationship was equivocal but usually followed the independence model prediction of zero correlation. It is concluded that memory and judgment will be directly related when the judgment was based directly on the retrieval of evidence information in memory-based judgment tasks. (61 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Spacing effects on implicit memory tests.

The spacing effect refers to the advantage in memory for information that is repeated at separated points of time over information repeated in massed fashion. Spacing effects have been demonstrated on numerous explicit measures of memory. A series of experiments reported here demonstrate spacing effects on 3 implicit memory measures: (1) spelling of homophonic words, (2) word-fragment completion, and (3) perceptual identification. The spacing effect in perceptual identification was not found when materials were studied incidentally or when spacing was manipulated between lists. Also, whereas recognition of synonyms decreased as a function of spacing between synonyms, perceptual identification was uninfluenced by the spacing between synonyms. The results are interpreted as evidence that spacing effects on cued memory tests (both explicit and implicit) reflect optional rehearsal strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)