Personally important autobiographical memories are the smallest unit of the life story, which begins to emerge in adolescence. This study examined 2 features of self-defining memories in late adolescence, the meaning made of the memories to garner an understanding of the narrative construction of identity as a life story and how those memories…

Two studies investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC), adult age, and the resolution of conflict between familiarity and recollection in short-term recognition tasks. Experiment 1 showed a specific deficit of young adults with low WMC in rejecting intrusion probes (i.e., highly familiar probes) in a modified Sternberg…

In 3 experiments, young and older adults studied lists of unrelated word pairs and were given confidence-rated item and associative recognition tests. Several different models of recognition were fit to the confidence-rating data using techniques described by S. Macho (2002, 2004). Concordant with previous findings, item recognition data were best…

Words and pictures with earlier learned labels are processed faster than words and pictures with later learned labels. This age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect has been extensively investigated in many different types of tasks. This article provides a review of these studies including picture naming, word naming, speeded word naming, word…

Math difficulties share many common features with reading difficulties. In as much as they do so, the general approach to reading disability overlaps with math disability. Both math and learning to read share several domain-general features such as long-term and short- term memory, successive and simultaneous processing, flexibility in…

The present study was aimed at simultaneously determining on the same subject, the effects of stress on retrieval of flexible (contextual or temporal) or stable (spatial) information. Three behavioral paradigms carried out in a four-hole board were designed as follows: (1) Simple Discrimination (SD), in which mice learned a single discrimination;…

It has been suggested that retrieval during a nonreinforced test induces reconsolidation instead of extinction of the mnemonic trace. Reconsolidation would preserve the original memory from the labilization induced by its nonreinforced recall through a hitherto uncharacterized mechanism requiring protein synthesis. Given the importance that such a…

We investigated whether postextinction administration of methylene blue (MB) could enhance retention of an extinguished conditioned response. MB is a redox compound that at low doses elevates cytochrome oxidase activity, thereby improving brain energy production. Saline or MB (4 mg/kg intraperitoneally) were administered to rats for 5 d following…

Brain-based teaching and learning focuses on how the brain learns best, and emerging brain research is a significant resource, but only if one knows how to use it as such. Teachers have the professional training and classroom experience to know first hand where there are problems in educational practices, but most teachers haven't been taught…

This study examined the correlates of symptom-seeking behavior for Alzheimer's disease (AD) among middle-aged persons. Symptom seeking, the tendency to search for signs of disease, is one manifestation of an individual's concern about developing AD. The data were obtained from a survey of two subsamples of 40-60 year old adults: 1) 108 adult…

This study examined the relationship between time spent on reading and reading comprehension in a second language (L2). Eighty-one French-speaking learners of English, from beginners to advanced, were tested for reading comprehension in French and in English as well as for English grammar and vocabulary competence. Low-proficiency learners showed…

The author is presenting a program that she designed for teaching liaison interpreting to translation students in their fifth semester of the translation program at the College of Languages and Translation (COLT), who are starting their training in liaison interpreting. The students never had any interpreting or translation training before. The…

Extending research on age norms in adults, the development of the knowledge of two components of the cultural concept of biography, biographical salience of and age norms for life events was studied from late childhood to early adulthood in Study 1 and across adulthood in Study 2. The largest increase in knowledge was found between ages 8 and 12,…

The relations of maternal reminiscing style and child self-concept to children's shared and independent autobiographical memories were examined in a sample of 189 three-year-olds and their mothers from Chinese families in China, first-generation Chinese immigrant families in the United States, and European American families. Mothers shared…

The authors examined the effects of age and ability (as measured by education and verbal ability) on self-reported memory functioning in adulthood. In Study 1, the age and ability groups responded similarly to the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (D. E. Broadbent, P. F. Cooper, P. Fitzgerald, & K. R. Parkes, 1982), but differences emerged when the…