Examined patients (N=14) with mild Alzheimer's dementia (DAT), patients with major depression (N=10), and normal control subjects (N=14), for rate of forgetting. Suggests that some form of deficient consolidation contributes to memory loss in DAT but not in depression. Implicates the disruption of different psychobiological mechanisms in these…

This manual provides guidance and documentation for users of the longitudinal kindergarten-fourth grade (K-4) public-use data file of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011), which includes the first release of the public version of the third-grade data. This manual mainly provides information specific…

To achieve enduring retention, people must usually study information on multiple occasions. How does the timing of study events affect retention? Prior research has examined this issue only in a spotty fashion, usually with very short time intervals. To characterize spacing effects over significant durations, over 1,350 individuals were taught a…

The functional organization of working memory (WM) in the human prefrontal cortex remains unclear. The present study used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to clarify the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) both in the types of information (verbal vs. spatial), and the types of processes (maintenance vs.…

Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not…

A sentence is readily understood and recalled when presented one word at a time using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at 10 words/s [Potter, M. C. (1984). Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP): A method for studying language processing. In D. Kieras & M. Just (Eds.), "New methods in reading comprehension research" (pp. 91-118).…

Four experiments examined subjective experience during retrieval in the DRM false memory paradigm [Deese, J. (1959). "On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall." "Journal of Experimental Psychology," 58, 17-22; Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). "Creating false memories: Remembering words not…

Many studies into learners' ideas in science have reported that aspects of learners' thinking can be represented in terms of entities described in such terms as alternative conceptions or conceptual frameworks, which are considered to describe relatively stable aspects of conceptual knowledge that are represented in the learner's memory and…

People will often look to empty, uninformative locations in the world when trying to recall spoken information. This spatial indexing behaviour occurs when the information had previously been associated with those locations. It remains unclear, however, whether this behaviour is an example of a simple association across perceptual and cognitive…

Performance on tests of source memory is typically based on recollection of contextual information associated with an item. However, recent neuroimaging results have suggested that the perirhinal cortex, a region thought to support familiarity-based item recognition, may support source attributions if source information is encoded as a feature of…

Aim: The Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale (GSS) assesses suggestibility by asking respondents to recall a short story, followed by exposure to leading questions and pressure to change their responses. Suggestibility, as assessed by the GSS, appears to be elevated in people with intellectual disabilities (ID). This has been shown to reflect to some…

Adults can represent approximate numbers of items independently of language. This approximate number system can discriminate and compare entities as varied as dots, sounds, or actions. But can multiple different types of entities be enumerated in parallel and stored as independent numerosities? Subjects who were prevented from verbally counting…

The study examines the relation of death experience to death attitudes and to autobiographical memory use. Participants (N = 52) completed standard death attitude measures and wrote narratives about a death-related autobiographical memory and (for comparison) a memory of a low point. Self-ratings of the memory narratives were used to assess their…

The formation and recall of memories are fundamental aspects of life and help preserve the complex collection of experiences that provide us with a sense of identity and autonomy. Scientists have recently started to investigate pharmacological agents that inhibit or "dampen" the strength of memory formation and recall. The development of…

This study examined the effect of distributed questioning on learning and retention in a college lecture course. A total of 48 question pairs were presented over four exams. The 16 question pairs associated with each of the three blocks of the course appeared on the block exams, and all 48 appeared on the final exam. The two questions in each pair…