Calculation latency: The μ of memory and the τ of transformation

Does numeral format (e.g., 4 + 8 vs. four + eight) affect calculation per se? University students (N=47) solved single-digit addition problems presented as Arabic digits or English words and reported their strategies (memory retrieval or procedures such as counting or transformation). Decomposition of the response time (RT) distributions into μ (reflecting shift) and t (reflecting skew) confirmed that retrieval trials contributed predominantly to μ, whereas procedure trials contributed predominantly to τ. The format × problem size RT interaction (i.e., greater word-format RT costs for large problems than for small problems) was associated entirely with μ and not with τ. Reported use of procedures presented a corresponding format × size interaction. Together, these results indicate that, relative to the well-practiced digit format, the unfamiliar word format disrupts number-fact retrieval and promotes use of procedural strategies.     

Hand-eye coordination: The role of “motor memory”

Ten Ss attempted to track a visual target, which was moved either by hand (test run) or by a tape recording of the same hand movements (control run). On some test runs, movement of the target lagged behind that of the hand by a fixed amount (.18, .36, .72, or 1.44 sec). The number of saccades occurring on a given test run was divided by the number on the matched control run, and the test/control ratio was studied as a function of the hand-to-target lag time. With lag times of .36 sec or less, the test/control ratios were less than 1. indicating that manual control of the target had a significant effect on oculomotor performance. This effect disappeared at a lag close to .72 sec. The results are discussed in terms of a hypothetical “motor memory.”     

The material memory of history: Edgar Zilsel’s epistemology of historiography

The paper focuses on the concept of matter and the material in Edgar Zilsel??s considerations about historiographical methods in the context of the Marxist debates on the materialist conception of history in the 1920s and 1930s (Gy?rgy Lukács, Max Adler). It sheds light on Zilsel??s understanding of matter as fluctuating, interfering processes in the lapse of time and the related concept of irreversible laws and relates it to Ernst Mach??s philosophy and to Richard Semon??s theory of mneme. Finally, it shows the practical consequences of the concept of materialism in Edgar Zilsel??s epistemology.     

The life (and Death?) of a student counselling service

This is a case study of a Student Counselling Service in an English university - its historical antecedents, its seven-year We, and its apparent demise. The evidence, from documentary and survey sources, suggests that from the outset the service had to contend with a multiplicity of problems of a practical, organisational and ideological kind. These together militated against its becoming an accepted and integral part of the university organisation and left it exposed as one section of the institution which, as an economy measure, could conveniently be deemed expendable. The case study illustrates the potency of dangers anticipated by some authorities in the field of student counselling, and thus serves as a warning to other institutions of higher education and to professional counsellors who might be employed in them.     

Does conceptual implicit memory develop? The role of processing demands

The author investigated the importance of processing considerations within implicit memory in a developmental design. Second-graders (n = 87) and college students (n = 81) completed perceptual (word stem completion) and conceptual (category generation) implicit memory tests after studying target items either nonsemantically (read) or semantically (generated). In support of previous research, the author found no age differences in priming in the nonsemantic study/perceptual test condition. Age differences in priming were found in the semantic study/conceptual test condition, however, where college students had significantly higher priming scores than did children. These developmental dissociations support the theory that the processing requirements of conceptual implicit memory are similar to those in explicit memory. The author also discusses the contribution of the Transfer Appropriate Processing (TAP; H. L. Roediger, D. A. Gallo, & L. Geraci, 2002) framework to understanding these findings.     

The episodic buffer: a new component of working memory?

In 1974, Baddeley and Hitch proposed a three-component model of working memory. Over the years, this has been successful in giving an integrated account not only of data from normal adults, but also neuropsychological, developmental and neuroimaging data. There are, however, a number of phenomena that are not readily captured by the original model. These are outlined here and a fourth component to the model, the episodic buffer, is proposed. It comprises a limited capacity system that provides temporary storage of information held in a multimodal code, which is capable of binding information from the subsidiary systems, and from long-term memory, into a unitary episodic representation. Conscious awareness is assumed to be the principal mode of retrieval from the buffer. The revised model differs from the old principally in focussing attention on the processes of integrating information, rather than on the isolation of the subsystems. In doing so, it provides a better basis for tackling the more complex aspects of executive control in working memory.     

Does working memory training work? The promise and challenges of enhancing cognition by training working memory

A growing body of literature shows that one's working memory (WM) capacity can be expanded through targeted training. Given the established relationship between WM and higher cognition, these successful training studies have led to speculation that WM training may yield broad cognitive benefits. This review considers the current state of the emerging WM training literature, and details both its successes and limitations. We identify two distinct approaches to WM training, strategy training and core training, and highlight both the theoretical and practical motivations that guide each approach. Training-related increases in WM capacity have been successfully demonstrated across a wide range of subject populations, but different training techniques seem to produce differential impacts upon the broader landscape of cognitive abilities. In particular, core WM training studies seem to produce more far-reaching transfer effects, likely because they target domain-general mechanisms of WM. The results of individual studies encourage optimism regarding the value of WM training as a tool for general cognitive enhancement. However, we discuss several limitations that should be addressed before the field endorses the value of this approach.     

The co-witness misinformation effect: memory blends or memory compliance?

For 30 years hundreds of researchers have shown participants videos and slide-sequences of events, presented the participants with misleading information, and found that this misinformation distorted their memories. The purpose of this study was to establish whether those misled participants are reporting a memory blend of the two sources of information or whether they are simply complying with the post-event information. A total of 92 participants were shown one of two versions of six different videos, which included some subtle differences. After having watched each video individually, participants were paired with someone who had seen the other version and they discussed the clips together. They then individually answered questions about the videos, and their responses showed that some of the distorted memories were blends of the original information and the post-event information. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Trio of Time: On Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Time

Human Studies - The transition from “natural” sensation to “phenomenological” perception is revealed since the dynamic temporality within perception is elaborated by...     

The validity of “conceptual span” as a measure of working memory capacity

Three experiments tested whether a modified version of the Clustered Conceptual Span task (H. J. Haarmann, E. J. Davelaar, & M. Usher, 2003), which ostensibly requires active maintenance of semantic representations, predicted individual differences in higher-order cognitive abilities better than short-term memory (STM) span tasks or nonsemantic versions of the "Conceptual" task did. Nonsemantic Conceptual tasks presented short word lists clustered by color, first letter, or initial vowel sound, and cued subjects to recall only 1 of 3 clusters from each list; the Semantic task clustered words by taxonomic category. The Semantic Conceptual task generally failed to predict incremental variance in either verbal abilities or general fluid intelligence beyond the other Conceptual tasks or STM span tasks. Although the Semantic task showed a stronger relation to working memory span tasks than did the nonsemantic tasks (Experiment 3), that stronger relation did not translate into strong prediction of cognitive individual differences.     

The effects of exposure to dynamic expressions of affect on 5-month-olds’ memory

The purpose of this study was to examine the behavioral effects of adults’ communicated affect on 5-month-olds’ visual recognition memory. Five-month-olds were exposed to a dynamic and bimodal happy, angry, or neutral affective (face–voice) expression while familiarized to a novel geometric image. After familiarization to the geometric image and exposure to the affective expression, 5-month-olds received either a 5-min or 1-day retention interval. Following the 5-min retention interval, infants exposed to the happy affective expressions showed a reliable preference for a novel geometric image compared to the recently familiarized image. Infants exposed to the neutral or angry affective expression failed to show a reliable preference following a 5-min delay. Following the 1-day retention interval, however, infants exposed to the neutral expression showed a reliable preference for the novel geometric image. These results are the first to demonstrate that 5-month-olds’ visual recognition memory is affected by the presentation of affective information at the time of encoding.     

Does snobbish service generate better sales? The case of luxury goods

The objective of this study is to explore whether a “bad” service encounter triggers a consumer's impulse purchase in a luxury goods store in an Asian emerging market. A 2 (service encounter: favorable vs. snobbish) × 2 (shopping companion: alone vs. with a close friend) between‐group factorial design was employed with 160 female consumers in an Asian emerging market to examine the antecedents of both the urge to save social identity and the impulse purchase of luxury goods. The results show that consumers in an Asian emerging market can be triggered to make an impulse purchase of a luxury good, not because they received excellent service in the store but because they encountered snobbish service, especially when shopping with a close friend. Research implications and limitations are also discussed.     

On the costs of refocusing items in working memory: a matter of inhibition or decay?

The present study investigates the mental processes that are applied to previously attended items of working memory. In an object-switching task, participants counted the number of sequentially presented objects. In Experiment 1 the processing time increased when the object category switched from the prior trial compared to a repetition. More importantly, the further in the past the last instance of a current category was presented, the more processing time was necessary - an observation suggesting passive decay rather than inhibition of previously attended items. However, results differed when only two object categories were employed. Experiment 2 suggests that the lack of a clear indication of decay with small numbers of categories was due to participants' expectancy of category switches rather than repetitions. Taken together, the results suggest that working memory items become less accessible the longer they have not been attended to, when strategic processes are controlled.     

The consequences for memory of imagining in another person’s voice

Subjects listened to and imagined words and then attempted to discriminate words they had heard from words they had imagined. Discrimination was better when subjects imagined themselves saying the words (Experiments 1 and 2) than when subjects imagined the words in the speaker’s voice. Subjects also had more difficulty discriminating imagined from perceived words when they imagined in the speaker’s voice than when they imagined words in a voice other than their own or the speaker’s (Experiment 1). The results are consistent with the idea that reality monitoring is affected by the degree of similarity in sensory characteristics of memories derived from perception and from imagination (Johnson & Raye, 1981).     

The importance of working memory updating in the Prisoner’s dilemma

Successful cooperation requires that humans can flexibly adjust choices to their partner’s behaviour. This, in turn, presupposes a representation of a partner’s past decisions in working memory. The aim of the current study was to investigate the role of working memory processes in cooperation. For that purpose, we tested the effects of working memory updating (Experiment 1) and working memory maintenance demands (Experiments 2 and 3) on cooperative behaviour in the Prisoner’s dilemma game. We found that demands on updating, but not maintenance, of working memory contents impaired strategy use in the Prisoner’s dilemma. Thus, our data show that updating a partner’s past behaviour in working memory represents an important precondition for strategy use in cooperation.     

Flashbulb memories? The effects of when the initial memory report was obtained

Why have some researchers found reports of flashbulb memories to be stable, while others have observed inconsistencies? Paradoxically, it appears that relatively long delays between event and initial documentation have produced greater consistency of participants' reports. To investigate this directly, we collected the initial documentation of hearing about O.J. Simpson's acquittal either five hours or one week after the acquittal was read. Observed consistency of memories varied as a function of documentation time; following an eight-week retention, the delayed reports were more consistent. The delayed group also reported fewer propositions in their initial documentation. We proposed a consolidation model to explain these results: during the days immediately following a newsworthy event, the narrative structure of these memories changes in that some details are forgotten. After this consolidation period, the memories may solidify. Thus, it may have been easier for the delayed group to provide consistent memories at the two intervals.     

The emotion-induced memory trade-off: More than an effect of overt attention?

Although it has been suggested that many effects of emotion on memory are attributable to attention, in the present study we addressed the hypothesis that such effects may relate to a number of different factors during encoding or postencoding. One way to look at the effects of emotion on memory is by examining the emotion-induced memory trade-off, whereby enhanced memory for emotional items often comes at the cost of memory for surrounding background information. We present evidence that this trade-off cannot be explained solely by overt attention (measured via eyetracking) directed to the emotional items during encoding. Participants did not devote more overt attention to emotional than to neutral items when those items were selectively remembered (at the expense of their backgrounds). Only when participants were asked to answer true/false questions about the items and the backgrounds—a manipulation designed to affect both overt attention and poststimulus elaboration—was there a reduction in selective emotional item memory due to an increase in background memory. These results indicate that the allocation of overt visual attention during encoding is not sufficient to predict the occurrence of selective item memory for emotional items.     

Age differences in working memory— The roles of storage and selective access

Twenty-four young (23 years) and 24 old (71 years) adults performed arithmetic tasks with working memory loads ranging from 1 to 4. Age groups were equivalent in mean accuracy and speed of arithmetic operations under minimal working memory load, but old adults were slower than young with memory demands >1. Access to a new object in working memory as the basis of computation required additional time. This object-switching cost increased with increases in memory demand, but was unaffected by age, indicating that old adults have no deficit in selective access to working memory.