Courses on memory improvement were taught to 46 older adults. Their most frequent complaint was inability to remember names. Almost all reported reduction in anxiety following training. Immediate and four-week follow-ups showed significantly better memory performance than on the pretest. (SK)

Elementary and college students completed a cued intentional forgetting task, either a direct or indirect test of word recall, and a final free recall test for both remember- and forget-cued words. In both groups, performance on word-stem completion tasks was enhanced in comparison with an immediate free-recall group, but only for material thought…

Suggests that phonological short-term memory (STM) tasks are influenced by both lexical and sublexical factors inherent in the selection and construction of the stimuli to be recalled. Examined whether long-term memory influences STM at a sublexical level by investigating whether the frequency with which one-syllable nonwords occur in polysyllabic…

The biological process by which memory occurs is examined, through the study of changes over time in neuromuscular synapses. Research of the process of synapse elimination in mice shows that when damaged nerves reconnect, only receptors of the winning nerve eventually remain; other receptors fade away, leaving part of the endplate permanently…

A comparison of 12 persons with Parkinson's disease (PD), 12 with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and 12 in a control group on a memory scanning task found some slow scanning speed in PD patients. Despite normal scanning speed, most AD patients required highly structured instructions to complete the task, and many remained unable to do so. (SK)

Reports four experiments which contrast the levels-of-processing perspective (holding that the durability of memory traces is a function of the depth to which items are processed) with the transfer-appropriate-processing perspective (holding that encoded events are always represented in a semantic memory code). (MM)

Two groups of adults (185 over age 60, 184 ages 17-39) both believed that many items are better remembered by older adults. The older group reported some memory decline; both groups agreed that some memory tasks are more difficult and take longer for older adults. Older subjects used more external memory aids. (SK)

Describes the five types of memory: (1) semantic--what words and symbols mean; (2) implicit--how to do something such as ride a bike; (3) remote--data collected over the years; (4) working--short-term memory; and (5) episodic--recent experiences. Assesses the likelihood of each type's decaying over time. (JOW)

Sixty undergraduate college students took part in two experiments designed to test the hypothesis that the involvement of inference in remembering leads to overconfidence. Discusses the response-independence model, which is appropriate to retrieval, and the response-dependence model, which applies to inference. (DR)

Infants were trained to kick their feet into a crib mobile and tested two weeks later. Found that presentation of a moving, but not a stationary, mobile in a reminder treatment 24 hours before testing alleviated forgetting in the test and that, in the test, memory of the kicking activity was specific to the conditions of the original training. (BC)

Finds that subjects with a choice about whether to interact with their partner again (or with one of the persons they observed) remembered less in general than those expecting to interact with the same person or with a different person. Participants remembered significantly more conversational information using cued recall than observers, and…

The presence of a developmental trend in the magnitude of perceptual repetition priming was assessed using a picture completion task. Found that four- and six-year olds and young adults showed the same amount of repetition priming when both a proportional measure of priming was used and spurious explicit memory influences were partialed out from…

Administered Logical Memory subtest of Wechsler Memory Scale to 40 closed-head-injured (CHI) and 40 control subjects. Tested recall immediately after administration, 40 minutes later, and 24 hours later. Results suggest that CHI patients have difficulty selectively retrieving most important information after long delay. (Author/NB)

Investigated relationships among participants' assessments of working alliance, effectiveness of counseling sessions, and memories for important therapeutic events in 10 counseling dyads. Found that counselors exhibited greater specificity of recall of important events for sessions rated as more effective and showed greater specificity of recall…

Findings reveal that memory retrieval at six months of age is highly specific to the setting in which the memory is acquired. This suggests that infants learn what events are associated with what places before they are able to locomote independently and acquire a spatiotemporal map of the relations between those places. (RH)