Here we examine the role of the exchange protein directly activated by cAMP (Epac) in ß-adrenergic-dependent associative odor preference learning in rat pups. Bulbar Epac agonist (8-pCPT-2-O-Me-cAMP, or 8-pCPT) infusions, paired with odor, initiated preference learning, which was selective for the paired odor. Interestingly, pairing odor with Epac…

This study focuses on the assessment of working memory and linguistic skills in 21 Italian-Russian speaking bilingual children who were born in Italy and inherited Russian from their parents. Their performance was compared to that of 21 monolingual Russian-speaking and 21 monolingual Italian-speaking peers. For the assessment of the two languages…

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular…

Material development is important for training beginner student interpreters, as it guides the direction of interpreting learning. One key principle is difficulty progression, which requires a good knowledge of the indicators of difficulty. Since text structure outweighs words and sentences in the information processing of consecutive…

Although active retrieval is an extremely effective study method, students continue to use less effective methods (Karpicke, "Journal of Experimental Psychology General," 138(4), 469-486, 2009; Hartwig and Dunlosky, "Psychonomic Bulletin & Review," 19(1), 126-134, 2012). There are likely many underlying reasons for using…

The cAMP response element (CRE)-binding protein, CREB, is a transcription factor whose activity in the brain is critical for long-term memory formation. Phosphorylation of Ser133 in the kinase-inducible domain (KID), that in turn leads to the recruitment of the transcriptional coactivator CREB-binding protein (CBP), is thought to mediate the…

Retrieval failures--moments when a memory will not come to mind--are a universal human experience. Yet many laypeople believe human memory is a reliable storage system in which a stored memory should be accessible. I predicted that people would see retrieval failures as aberrations and predict that fewer retrieval failures would happen in the…

The experience of fluency while learning might bias students' metacognitive judgments of learning (JOLs) and impair the efficacy of their study behaviors. In the present experiments, we examined whether perceptual fluency affects JOLs (1) when people only experience one level of fluency, (2) when item relatedness is also available as a cue, and…

Understanding how episodic memories are formed and retrieved is necessary if we are to treat disorders in which they malfunction. Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChR) in the hippocampus and cortex underlie memory formation, but there is conflicting evidence regarding their role in memory retrieval. Additionally, there is no consensus on…

We briefly discuss memory types and three modern principles of neuroscience: 1) Protein growth at the synapse, 2) the three-brain theory, and 3) the interplay of the hippocampus, the neocortex, and the prefrontal cortex. To illustrate the potential of this perspective, four applications of these principles are provided.

Numerous studies have suggested that older adults preferentially remember positive information ("positivity effect"), however others have reported mixed results. One potential source of conflict is that aging is not a unitary phenomenon and individual differences exist. We modified a standard neuropsychological test to vary emotional…

How do people learn categories and what changes with development? The current study attempts to address these questions by focusing on the role of attention in the development of categorization. In Experiment 1, participants (adults, 7-year-olds, and 4-year-olds) were trained with novel categories consisting of deterministic and probabilistic…

This paper systematically reviews the studies of working memory in second language learning in China over the past 20 years. A total of 140 studies that were published in 13 major foreign language journals during the past 20 years (2000-2019) were categorized and analyzed according to research method, educational level, and research content. For…

This study examined the role of parents' reminiscing style in preschoolers' memory-related functioning and general emotion regulation. In 87 families, each parent rated their child's (M[subscript age] = 4.07 years, SD = 0.80) emotion regulation and discussed a positive and a negative memory with their child (resulting in 275 conversations).…

Purpose: This study aimed to develop and validate a screening questionnaire for the early identification of language difficulties in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking preschool children. Method: The article is divided into two studies. In the first study, we reported the theoretical principles that guided the development of the Screening for…