The theory of memetic evolution--explaining the reproduction of cultural units called "memes"--illuminates the decline of poetry as a cultural presence by clarifying the contrasting attitudes towards poetry manifested by the co-discoverers of natural selection: Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. Darwin's eventual indifference to poetry…

We report data from 4 experiments using a recognition design with multiple probes to be matched to specific study positions. Items could be accessed rapidly, independent of set size, when the test order matched the study order (forward condition). When the order of testing was random, backward, or in a prelearned irregular sequence (reordered…

Physical pain (induced by tissue damage) and psychological pain (induced by surprising incentive loss) share a set of common neural substrates, but little is known about their interactions. The present research studied such interactions using the formalin test to induce physical pain and consummatory successive negative contrast (cSNC) to induce…

We consider the situation in which a learner must induce the rule that explains an observed set of data but the hypothesis space of possible rules is not explicitly enumerated or identified. The first part of the article demonstrates that as long as hypotheses are sparse (i.e., index less than half of the possible entities in the domain) then a…

This article explores the possible cognitive function associated with pointing gestures from a Vygotskian perspective. In Study 1, 39 children who were 2-4 years of age were observed in a solitary condition while solving a mnemonic task with or without an explicit memory demand. A discriminant analysis showed that children used noncommunicative…

Compared to adults, relatively little is known about autobiographical memory and the ability to imagine fictitious and future scenarios in school-aged children, despite the importance of these functions for development and subsequent independent living. Even less is understood about the effect of early hippocampal damage on children's memory and…

Drosophila larvae combine a numerically simple brain, a correspondingly moderate behavioral complexity, and the availability of a rich toolbox for transgenic manipulation. This makes them attractive as a study case when trying to achieve a circuit-level understanding of behavior organization. From a series of behavioral experiments, we suggest a…

The objective of this study investigated cognitive impairments and their correlations with fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) in patients with neuromyelitis optica (NMO) without visible lesions on conventional brain MRI during acute relapse. Twenty one patients with NMO and 21 normal control subjects received several cognitive…

A contentious issue in memory research is whether verbal short-term memory (STM) depends on a neural system specifically dedicated to the temporary maintenance of information, or instead relies on the same brain areas subserving the comprehension and production of language. In this study, we examined a large sample of adults with acquired brain…

Five experiments were conducted to examine whether the nature of the information that is monitored during prospective metamemory judgments affected the relative accuracy of those judgments. We compared item-by-item judgments of learning (JOLs), which involved participants determining how confident they were that they would remember studied items,…

Transient global amnesia (TGA) is a clinical syndrome characterized by the abrupt onset of a massive episodic memory deficit that spares other cognitive functions. If the anterograde dimension is known to be impaired in TGA, researchers have yet to investigate prospective memory (PM)--which involves remembering to perform an intended action at…

This essay examines how public memory is visualized in the statue to Canada's "gay pioneer," Alexander Wood. By analyzing three viewing positions of the statue--the official democratic memory, traditionalist countermemory, and camp countermemory--I argue each position enacts a distinct form of remembering Wood with implications for both…

The development of subjective recollection was investigated in participants aged 6-18 years. In Experiment 1 (N = 90), age-related improvements were found in understanding of the subjective experience of recollection, although robust levels of understanding were observed even in the youngest group. In Experiment 2 (N = 100), age-related…

Researchers of working memory currently debate capacity limits of the focus of attention, the proposed mental faculty in which items are most easily accessed. Cowan (1999) suggested that its capacity is about 4 chunks, whereas others have suggested that its capacity is only 1 chunk. Recently, Oberauer and Bialkova (2009) found evidence that 2…

The ability to interact with a constantly changing environment requires a balance between maintaining the currently relevant working memory content and being sensitive to potentially relevant new information that should be given priority access to working memory. Mesocortical dopamine projections to frontal brain areas modulate working memory…