Research has revealed that fetuses can learn from events in their environment. The most convincing evidence for fetal learning is habituation to vibroacoustic stimulation (VAS) in human fetuses and classical conditioning in rat fetuses. However, these two research areas have been independent of each other. There have been few attempts at classical…

Memory consolidation and reconsolidation require kinase activation and protein synthesis. Blocking either process during or shortly after training or recall disrupts memory stabilization, which suggests the existence of a critical time window during which these processes are necessary. Using a computational model of kinase synthesis and…

According to the cry of pain model of suicidal behavior, an over-general autobiographical memory function is often found in suicide attempters. The model has received empirical support in several studies, mainly of depressed patients. The present study investigated whether deficits in autobiographical memory may be associated with an increased…

Background: "Hurricane Katrina" devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast in August 2005. Intrusive re-experiencing is a common posttraumatic stress symptom. However, young children with limited introspection skills might have difficulties identifying their intrusive thoughts. Method: A sample of 165 5- to 9-year-old children were surveyed about their…

Little is known regarding metacognition in individuals with autism. Specifically, it is unclear how individuals with autism think about their own mental states. The current study assessed memory awareness during a facial recognition task. High-functioning children (M = 13.1 years, n = 18) and adults (M = 27.5 years, n = 16) with autism matched…

Do the emotional valence and arousal of events distort children's memories? Do valence and arousal modulate counterintuitive age increases in false memory? We investigated those questions in children, adolescents, and adults using the Cornell/Cortland Emotion Lists, a word list pool that induces false memories and in which valence and arousal can…

Dr. Henry L. (Roddy) Roediger is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in the Psychology Department at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) and a scholar of human memory. He graduated from Washington & Lee University in 1969 and received his PhD in psychology from Yale University. He served as chair of the Psychology…

The present study aimed to investigate whether an interference task might impact the sleep-dependent consolidation process of a mentally learned sequence of movements. Thirty-two participants were subjected to a first training session through motor imagery (MI) or physical practice (PP) of a finger sequence learning task. After 2 h, half of the…

The human mind has two types of memory: short-term and long-term. In all types of learning, it is best to use that structure rather than to fight against it. One way to do that is to ensure that learners can fit new information into patterns that can be stored in and more easily retrieved from long-term memory.

Objective: Recent theoretical and empirical work suggests that while unmedicated, children with ADHD have a deficit in subcortical processing that leads to greater and more varied prefrontal cortical (PFC) activation, compared to (a) age-matched control participants and (b) their own brain activity while on stimulant medication. This pattern has…

Does the capacity of visual short-term memory (VSTM) depend on the complexity of the objects represented in memory? Although some previous findings indicated lower capacity for more complex stimuli, other results suggest that complexity effects arise during retrieval (due to errors in the comparison process with what is in memory) that is not…

Testing spatial memory within the same environment used for learning produces interference between one's immediate representation of current position and the to-be-retrieved position. In a series of 3 experiments, we show that "current position" and its influence on memory performance can be driven by conceptual factors in an ambiguous…

In differentiation models, the processes of encoding and retrieval produce an increase in the distribution of memory strength for targets and a decrease in the distribution of memory strength for foils as the amount of encoding increases. This produces an increase in the hit rate and decrease in the false-alarm rate for a strongly encoded compared…

We examined the roles of the amygdala and hippocampus in the formation of emotionally relevant memories using an ethological model of conditioned fear termed conditioned defeat (CD). Temporary inactivation of the ventral, but not dorsal hippocampus (VH, DH, respectively) using muscimol disrupted the acquisition of CD, whereas pretraining VH…

Autobiographical memory impairments in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been attributed to a failure in using the self as an effective memory organisational system. To explore this hypothesis, we compared self-defining and everyday memories in adults with and without ASD. Results demonstrated that both groups were able to distinguish between…