This article focuses on the nature of the "transitional minutes" in "any" music class. When transitional minutes before, during, and after rehearsals and classes are unplanned and left to chance, much viable and valuable teaching time is lost. When transitional minutes are well structured, learning can proceed efficiently. One…

The purpose of this investigation was to test the assumption of asymmetric mapping between words and concepts in bilingual memory as proposed by the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM, Kroll & Stewart, 1994). Twenty four Spanish-English bilinguals (experiment 1) and twenty English-Spanish bilinguals (experiment 2) were presented with pairs of words,…

Rapamycin, an inhibitor of the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) kinase, has attracted interest as a possible prophylactic for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-associated fear memories. We report here that although rapamycin (40 mg/kg, i.p.) disrupted the consolidation and reconsolidation of fear-potentiated startle paradigm to a…

Synaptically released Zn[superscript 2+] is a potential modulator of neurotransmission and synaptic plasticity in fear-conditioning pathways. Zinc transporter 3 (ZnT3) knock-out (KO) mice are well suited to test the role of zinc in learned fear, because ZnT3 is colocalized with synaptic zinc, responsible for its transport to synaptic vesicles,…

Educators deal with the many dynamic functions and applications of the human brain on a daily basis. The theoretical research of the biology and functionality of the human brain is on the rise, and educational publishers continue to support books and scholarly articles that promote the notion that "brain research" can and should be applied to…

While the general dynamics governing collective memory processes are well developed theoretically, our tool kit for systematically assessing how collective memory changes over time remains limited. Here, we focus on a particular tragic event--the killing of five participants in an anti-KKK march in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Nov. 3, 1979--to…

Performance anxiety is a common problem for many students and an issue that educators often address. This article examines a model of performance anxiety based on working memory and attentional processes. The model is described in a way that is easily understood by students of all ages. It is then used to classify methods of reducing performance…

To examine the processes that support prospective remembering, previous research has often examined whether the presence of a prospective memory task slows overall responding on an ongoing task. Although slowed task performance suggests that monitoring is present, this method does not clearly establish whether monitoring is functionally related to…

Although people often have to learn from environments with scarce and highly selective outcome feedback, the question of how nonfeedback trials are represented in memory and affect later performance has received little attention in models of learning and decision making. In this article, the authors use the generalized context model (Nosofsky,…

Background: Tourette syndrome (TS) is characterized by dysfunctional connectivity between prefrontal cortex and sub-cortical structures, and altered meso-cortical and/or meso-striatal dopamine release. Since time processing is also regulated by fronto-striatal circuits and modulated by dopaminergic transmission, we hypothesized that time…

In this fMRI study, we investigated prefrontal cortex (PFC) and visual association regions during selective information processing. We recorded behavioral responses and neural activity during a delayed recognition task with a cue presented during the delay period. A specific cue ("Face" or "Scene") was used to indicate which one of the two…

Individuals with mathematics anxiety have been found to differ from their non-anxious peers on measures of higher-level mathematical processes, but not simple arithmetic. The current paper examines differences between mathematics anxious and non-mathematics anxious individuals in more basic numerical processing using a visual enumeration task.…

Word properties like imageability and word frequency improve cued recall of verbal paired-associates. We asked whether these enhancements follow simply from prior effects on item-memory, or also strengthen associations between items. Participants studied word pairs varying in imageability or frequency: pairs were "pure" (high-high, low-low) or…

This study explored the relative strength of five neuropsychological tests in correlating with productivity 1 year after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Six moderate-to-severe TBI patients who returned to work at 1-year post-injury were matched with six controls who were unemployed after 1 year based on age, severity of injury, and Functional…

Three experiments examined memory-based guidance of visual search using a modified version of the contextual-cueing paradigm (Jiang & Chun, 2001). The target, if present, was a conjunction of color and orientation, with target (and distractor) features randomly varying across trials (multiconjunction search). Under these conditions, reaction times…