Three- through 13-year olds were interviewed a few days after a hospital stay for traumatic injury, and again six months later. Children provided considerable information about the injury and hospital stay and made few commission errors; children's distress at the time of injury did not affect their recall of the event, but distress during the…

Reports a study to test the hypothesis that processing a story from a given perspective creates two memory representations: an overall representation of the story as a whole and a more enduring schematic trace containing only perspective-consistent information. Results did not show evidence of schematic dominance. (JAD)

Analyzed whether feelings have a disproportionate impact on the way people perceive and remember unusual, atypical people. The results of four experiments suggest that mood has a significantly greater influence on judgments when the targets do not fit a prototypical pattern, thus requiring more lengthy, extensive processing. (RJM)

Reviews the literature on the relation between early memory development and corresponding changes in brain development of infants. Finds that an adult-like form of explicit memory emerges between 8 and 12 months of age, drawing heavily on limbic and cortical structures. Offers theoretical perspectives for studying the ontogeny of memory. (JW)

Assessed preschoolers' recall of past events and emotional reactions to those events and the importance of emotion-related cues in activating event memory. Suggests the children were competent at remembering a past event that precipitated an emotion and displayed this competence by recalling their emotional reactions, goals, plans, and actions, as…

Examined the conditions under which children's memory is resistant to suggestibility versus vulnerable to suggestibility. Results suggest that children have more accurate memory for an event that occurred to them frequently, and that they are less vulnerable to suggestive influences such as biased interviewing procedures than they would be for an…

Examined cultural influences on young children's talk about their experiences, and the role these discussions may play in the development of autobiographical memory. Found that Caucasian families engage more frequently in this kind of talk than Korean families. Caucasian adults reporting earlier childhood memories indicated that early linguistic…

Research has demonstrated that memory is prone to distortion and is occasionally untrustworthy. Explores the reasons for false memories and explains that memories are vulnerable to postevent information, which can be integrated into memories. False memories can also come from leading questions, word associations, and unconscious editing by the…

This study explored relationship between working memory (WM) and mathematical problem solving, comparing children with learning disabilities (LD) to chronologically age-matched and younger achievement-matched children on measures of WM, phonological processing, problem-solving, and word problem-solving accuracy. Found support for notion that…

This study tested the hypothesis that children with high working memory capacities solve single-digit additions by direct retrieval of the answers from long-term memory more often than do children with low working memory capacities. Counting and reading letter span tasks were administered to groups of third-grade (mean age=107 months) and…

The authors manipulated repetitions and/or changes of abstract response rules and the specific stimulus- response (S-R) associations used under these rules. Experiments 1 and 2, assessing trial-to-trial priming effects, showed that repetition of complete S-R couplings produced only benefits when the rule also repeated (i.e., rule-S-R conjunctions)…

Switch costs in task switching are commonly attributed to an executive control process of task-set reconfiguration, particularly in studies involving the explicit task-cuing procedure. The authors propose an alternative account of explicitly cued performance that is based on 2 mechanisms: priming of cue encoding from residual activation of cues in…

The ability to remember visual stimuli over a short delay period is limited by the small capacity of visual working memory (VWM). Here the authors investigate the role of learning in enhancing VWM. Participants saw 2 spatial arrays separated by a 1-s interval. The 2 arrays were identical except for 1 location. Participants had to detect the…

Studies of gene expression following fear conditioning have demonstrated that the inducible transcription factor, "egr-1," is increased in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala shortly following fear conditioning. These studies suggest that "egr-1" and its protein product Egr-1 in the amygdala are important for learning and memory of fear. To…

A phenomenological approach was used to investigate the longitudinal recollections of participants of an out-of-school science program. The experience was a field trip to the Shenandoah National Park (USA) conducted in the fall of 2004. The science topic was geologic history and features related to the Shenandoah Valley. Two major themes relating…