This study examined the relations among early and recent experiences with abuse, depression, and adolescents' autobiographical memory in a longitudinal study of family violence. Participants' (N = 134) exposure to violence was documented when they were 6 to 12 years old and again when they were 12 to 18 years old. The second assessment included…

This study assessed the relative contribution of situational and memory-based influences to the reader's monitoring of complex narrative goal structures. In 2 experiments, people read stories according to which 2 collaborative subgoals had to succeed for a main goal to be achieved. At a story target region describing an attempt on the main goal,…

Background: PraderWilli syndrome (PWS) is a genetic disorder caused by the absence of expression of maternally imprinted genes on the long arm of chromosome 15 (15q 11-13). There are two main genetic sub-types: (1) deletion, caused by the absence of paternally derived genetic material; and (2) uniparental disomy (UPD), where two copies of…

Evidence about memory for order information comes from a number of different methodologies: human cognition, patient studies, neuroimaging studies, and animal lesion and behavioral studies. The present article discusses (a) evidence that order and item memory are separable; (b) proposed mechanisms for order memory (interitem associations, direct…

One component of successful social interactions is joint attention. It is now well established that when a gaze shift is observed, the observer's attention rapidly and automatically orients to the same location in space. It is also established that such attention shifts via gaze are relatively transient and do not evoke subsequent inhibition…

Our understanding the relationship between verbal short-term memory as indexed by nonword repetition and word learning must now incorporate myriad factors that were not as apparent 17 years ago when Gathercole and Baddeley (1989) proposed that "the phonological memory skills tapped by nonword repetition play a causal role in vocabulary…

Subjects in a darkroom saw an array of five phosphorescent objects on a circular table and, after a short delay, indicated which object had been moved. During the delay the subject, the table or a phosphorescent landmark external to the array was moved (a rotation about the centre of the table) either alone or together. The subject then had to…

Geometric alterations to the boundaries of a virtual environment were used to investigate the representations underlying human spatial memory. Subjects encountered a cue object in a simple rectangular enclosure, with distant landmarks for orientation. After a brief delay, during which they were removed from the arena, subjects were returned to it…

After extensive laboratory testing of the famous memorist Rajan, Thompson, Cowan, and Frieman (1993) proposed that he was innately endowed with a superior memory capacity for digits and letters and thus violated the hypothesis that exceptional memory fully reflects acquired ''skilled memory.'' We successfully replicated the empirical phenomena…

Numerous brain areas work in concert to subserve memory, with distinct memory functions relying differentially on distinct brain areas. For example, semantic memory relies heavily on posterior cortical regions, episodic memory on hippocampal regions, and working memory on prefrontal cortical regions. This article reviews relevant findings from…

The study presented here investigated the role of memory in normal sentence processing by looking at ERP effects to normal sentences and sentences containing grammatical violations. Sentences where the critical word was in the middle of the sentence were compared to sentences where the critical word always occurred in sentence-final position.…

Infants first generalize across contexts and cues at 3 months of age in operant tasks but not until 12 months of age in imitation tasks. Three experiments using an imitation task examined whether infants younger than 12 months of age might generalize imitation if conditions were more like those in operant studies. Infants sat on a distinctive mat…

Stimulus over-selectivity is a phenomenon displayed by individuals with autism, and has been implicated as a basis for many autistic-spectrum symptoms. In four experiments, non-autistic adult participants were required to learn a simple discrimination using picture cards, and then were tested for the emergence of stimulus over-selectivity, both…

Are children who experience an event repeatedly more suggestible about an instance of the event than children who experience it once? Researchers have answered this question both in the affirmative and in the negative. In this study, we hypothesized that the degree of association between details that changed across instantiations of the event…

The attentional blink refers to the transient impairment in perceiving the 2nd of 2 targets presented in close temporal proximity. In this article, the authors propose a neurobiological mechanism for this effect. The authors extend a recently developed computational model of the potentiating influence of the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system…