The consistency of flashbulb memories over long delays provides a test of theories of memory for highly emotional events. This study used September 11, 2001 as the target event, with test-retest delays of 2 and 3 years. The nature and consistency of flashbulb memories were examined as a function of delay between the target event and an initial…

Presents a postscript to the current authors' response to the comments by J. S. Bowers, M. F. Damian, and C. J. Davis on the current authors' original article, "Short-term memory for serial order: A recurrent neural network model,". Here, Botvinick and Plaut address Bowers et al's assertions that neurophysiological studies that have reported…

The human visual system can notice differences between memories of previous visual inputs and perceptions of new visual inputs, but the comparison process that detects these differences has not been well characterized. In this study, the authors tested the hypothesis that differences between the memory of a stimulus array and the perception of a…

Among the most fundamental issues in cognitive neuroscience is how the brain may be organized into process-specific and stimulus-specific regions. In the episodic memory domain, most functional neuroimaging studies have focused on the former dimension, typically investigating the neural correlates of various memory processes. Thus, there is little…

We investigated whether search accuracy of adult humans could be enhanced using differential reward contingencies in landmark-based spatial tasks conducted on a computer screen. We found that search accuracy was significantly enhanced by differential outcomes in a conditional spatial search task, in which the landmark-to-goal relationship depended…

When Stanford University obtained the Buckminster Fuller archive, it heralded it as "one of the most extensive known personal archives in existence." Taking up 2000 linear feet of shelf space, including hundreds of thousands of pages and over 4000 hours of audio/video, Fuller's collection does indeed sound impressive. But Fuller, considered an…

Elucidating the functional properties of the dentate gyrus (DG), CA3, and CA1 areas is critical for understanding the role of the dorsal hippocampus in contextual fear memory processing. In order to specifically disrupt various hippocampal inputs, we used region-specific infusions of DCG-IV, the metabotropic glutamate receptor agonist, which…

Criterion- versus distribution-shift accounts of frequency and strength effects in recognition memory were investigated with Type-2 signal detection receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, which provides a measure of metacognitive monitoring. Experiment 1 demonstrated a frequency-based mirror effect, with a higher hit rate and lower…

According to the principle of relative-strength competition, stronger items in memory block the retrieval of weaker items. This principle, integral to many theories of forgetting over the years, derives much of its support from the list-strength effect (LSE), in which strengthening some items in a study list makes it more difficult to recall other…

The authors present the context maintenance and retrieval (CMR) model of memory search, a generalized version of the temporal context model of M. W. Howard and M. J. Kahana (2002a), which proposes that memory search is driven by an internally maintained context representation composed of stimulus-related and source-related features. In the CMR…

A tacit but fundamental assumption of the theory of signal detection is that criterion placement is a noise-free process. This article challenges that assumption on theoretical and empirical grounds and presents the noisy decision theory of signal detection (ND-TSD). Generalized equations for the isosensitivity function and for measures of…

The molecular events that are responsible for strengthening synaptic connections and how these are linked to memory and learning are discussed. The laboratory preparations that allow the investigation of these events are also described.

It has been established that the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, is crucial for associative memory. The aim of the current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to investigate whether the hippocampus is differentially activated for associations between items processed in the same neocortical region (within-domain)…

People often perseverate, repeating outdated behaviors despite correctly answering questions about rules they should be following. Children who perseverate are slower to respond to such questions than children who successfully switch to new rules, even after controlling for age and processing speed. Thus, switchers may have stronger working memory…

The authors proposed and tested a psychological theory of causal structure learning based on local computations. Local computations simplify complex learning problems via cues available on individual trials to update a single causal structure hypothesis. Structural inferences from local computations make minimal demands on memory, require…