Interactions among the imagination, expertise reversal, and element interactivity effects were investigated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, less knowledgeable primary school students learning to use a bus timetable produced better performance under study than imagination conditions, but an increase in their experience reversed the result,…

Given the potential importance of using modality preference with instruction, the authors tested whether learning style preference correlated with memory performance in each of 3 sensory modalities: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. In Study 1, participants completed objective measures of pictorial, auditory, and tactile learning and learning…

Superior detection and rejection of 1 versus another class of items during recognition is called the mirror effect. Some mirror effects may involve strategic criterion adjustments based on item distinctiveness and its relation to memorability. Three experiments demonstrated mirror effects for known versus unknown scenes and 1 suggested a similar…

Four experiments tested the predictions made by the model outlined in A. H. Criss and R. M. Shiffrin (2004b). Participants studied 2 successive lists of pairs followed by a recognition memory test for the most recent list. Some items and some pairs were repeated across the 2 lists. Critically, a given item could be repeated in the same or…

Contextual cuing refers to the facilitation of performance in visual search due to the repetition of the same displays. Whereas previous studies have focused on contextual cuing within single-search trials, this study tested whether 1 trial facilitates visual search of the next trial. Participants searched for a T among Ls. In the training phase,…

This review surveys the empirical literature for assessments of learning problems in children from a neuropsychological perspective. An evaluation of children with learning problems must consider measures of working memory, attention, executive function, and comprehension (listening and written), particularly for children who do not respond to…

The present study tests a model of category effects upon stimulus estimation in children. Prior work with adults suggests that people inductively generalize distributional information about a category of stimuli and use this information to adjust their estimates of individual stimuli in a way that maximizes average accuracy in estimation (see…

Prospective studies have been held out as a kind of Holy Grail in research about remembering or forgetting child sexual abuse. They seem to hold the perfect answer to the verification problems that plague retrospective self-reports in the clinical literature. Prospective studies begin with verified cases of abuse. Then they require detective work…

Language learning requires a capacity to recall novel series of speech sounds. Research shows that prosodic marks create grouping effects enhancing serial recall. However, any restriction on memory affecting the reproduction of prosody would limit the set of patterns that could be learned and subsequently used in speech. By implication, grouping…

In a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we demonstrated an involvement of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) during an implicit learning task. We concluded that the MTL was engaged because of the complex contingencies that were implicitly learned. In addition, the basal ganglia demonstrated effects of a paralleled…

Emotionally charged experiences alter memory storage via the activation of hormonal systems. Previously, we have shown that compared with rats trained for a massed spatial learning task in the water maze in warm water (25 degrees C), animals that were trained in cold water (19 degrees C) performed better and showed higher levels of the stress…

We have carried out a global survey of age-related changes in mRNA levels in the 57BL/6NIA mouse hippocampus and found a difference in the hippocampal gene expression profile between 2-month-old young mice and 15-month-old middle-aged mice correlated with an age-related cognitive deficit in hippocampal-based explicit memory formation. Middle-aged…

Recognition memory, involving the ability to discriminate between a novel and familiar object, depends on the integrity of the perirhinal cortex (PRH). Glutamate, the main excitatory neurotransmitter in the cortex, is essential for many types of memory processes. Of the subtypes of glutamate receptor, metabotropic receptors (mGluRs) have received…

The "Weather Prediction" task is a widely used task for investigating probabilistic category learning, in which various cues are probabilistically (but not perfectly) predictive of class membership. This means that a given combination of cues sometimes belongs to one class and sometimes to another. Prior studies showed that subjects can improve…

Recent evidence suggests a close functional relationship between memory formation in the hippocampus and dopaminergic neuromodulation originating in the ventral tegmental area and medial substantia nigra of the midbrain. Here we report midbrain activation in two functional MRI studies of visual memory in healthy young adults. In the first study,…