Cholinesterase inhibitors positively affect cognition in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other conditions, but no controlled functional MRI studies have examined where their effects occur in the brain. We examined the effects of donepezil hydrochloride (Aricept[Registered sign]) on cognition and brain activity in patients with amnestic mild cognitive…

Although many studies have shown an association between verbal short-term memory (STM) and vocabulary development, the precise nature of this association is not yet clear. The current study reexamined this relation in 4- to 6-year-olds by designing verbal STM tasks that maximized memory for either item or serial order information. Although…

This study investigated the constraints underlying developmental improvements in complex working memory span performance among 120 children of between 6 and 10 years of age. Independent measures of processing efficiency, storage capacity, rehearsal speed, and basic speed of processing were assessed to determine their contribution to age-related…

This article addresses the relation between item recognition and associative (cued) recall. Going beyond measures of performance on each task, the analysis focuses on the degree to which the contingency between successful recognition and successful recall of a studied item reflects the commonality of memory processes underlying the recognition and…

Judgments of learning (JOLs) made during multiple study-test trials underestimate increases in recall performance across those trials, an effect that has been dubbed the underconfidence-with-practice (UWP) effect. In 3 experiments, the authors examined the contribution of retrieval fluency to the UWP effect for immediate and delayed JOLs. The UWP…

Poorer performance in conditions involving task repetition within blocks of mixed tasks relative to task repetition within blocks of single task is called mixing cost (MC). In 2 experiments exploring 2 hypotheses regarding the origins of MC, participants either switched between cued shape and color tasks, or they performed them as single tasks.…

In this commentary, the authors discuss the implications of A. S. Green, E. Rafaeli, N. Bolger, P. E. Shrout, and H. T. Reis's (2006) diary studies with respect to memory. Researchers must take 2 issues into account when determining whether paper-and-pencil or handheld electronic diaries gather more trustworthy data. The first issue is a matter of…

It has been suggested that in order to sustain the lifestyle of substance abuse, addicted schizophrenia patients would have less negative symptoms, better social skills, and less cognitive impairments. Mounting evidence supports the first two assumptions, but data lack regarding cognition in dual diagnosis schizophrenia. Seventy-six schizophrenia…

Several researchers have proposed that developmental improvements in children's face recognition abilities might reflect an increasing reliance on configural information (i.e. spatial relations between features) in faces (Carey & Diamond, 1994; Mondloch, Le Grand & Maurer, 2002). We investigated 4- and 5-year-olds' use of configural information…

When navigating by path integration, knowledge of one's position becomes increasingly uncertain as one walks from a known location. This uncertainty decreases if one perceives a known landmark location nearby. We hypothesized that remembering landmarks might serve a similar purpose for path integration as directly perceiving them. If this is true,…

A profound loss of cortical cholinergic innervation is a nearly invariant feature of advanced Alzheimer's disease (AD). The temporal course of this lesion and its relationship to other aspects of the disease have not yet been fully clarified. Despite assertions to the contrary, a review of the evidence suggests that a perturbation of cholinergic…

Animals recognize a taste cue as aversive when it has been associated with post-ingestive malaise; this associative learning is known as conditioned taste aversion (CTA). When an animal consumes a new taste and no negative consequences follow, it becomes recognized as a safe signal, leading to an increase in its consumption in subsequent…

Memories can have different strengths, largely dependent on the intensity of reinforcers encountered. The relationship between reinforcement and memory strength is evident in asymptotic memory curves, with the level of the asymptote related to the intensity of the reinforcer. Although this is likely a fundamental property of memory formation,…

Learning to discriminate between spatial locations defined by two adjacent arms of a radial maze in the conditioned cue preference paradigm requires two kinds of information: latent spatial learning when the rats explore the maze with no food available, and learning about food availability in two spatial locations when the rats are then confined…

Conventional lesion methods have shown that damage to the rodent hippocampus can impair previously acquired spatial memory in tasks such as the water maze. In contrast, work with reversible lesion methods using a different spatial task has found remote memory to be spared. To determine whether the finding of spared remote spatial memory depends on…