Individual Differences in Working Memory Abilities in Healthy Adults

The goal of this study was to understand the role of individual characteristics such as age, gender and education of healthy adults on working memory abilities, as conceptualized in the central executive, phonological loop, and visuospatial sketchpad. The sample comprised 302 adults aged from 18 to 65 with different educational backgrounds. Participants were submitted to a protocol of established neuropsychological tests that were selected to assess the central executive, phonological loop, and visuospatial sketchpad. The results revealed that these factors influenced working memory abilities differentially. Education level influenced all the three components in the same direction. Individuals with higher academic qualifications have better performance in tests assessing the central executive, phonological loop, and visuospatial sketchpad, whereas age affected performance in the task evaluating the central executive. Age and gender also influenced the performance in tasks related to visuospatial sketchpad in the sense that younger individuals or men reveal better visual and spatial abilities as conceptualized in the visuospatial sketchpad.     

Individual Differences in Arousal and Accessibility to Information in Memory

The authors conducted 9 experiments to test the hypothesis (S. Schwartz, 1975) that arousal influences the accessibility of information stored in memory. They investigated the relationship between arousal levels (as indexed by personality types) and the type of stimuli or cues presented during study or test. They predicted that low-arousal individuals (stable extroverted individuals in Experiments 1-3 and 5-9 and high-impulsive individuals in Experiment 4) would be influenced by semantic stimuli, whereas high-arousal individuals (neurotic introverted individuals in Experiments 1-3 and 5-9 and low-impulsive individuals in Experiment 4) would be influenced by physical (i.e., graphic, phonetic, or both) stimuli. They tested the arousal-accessibility hypothesis by using a variety of tasks including verbal discrimination, false recognition, cued recall, and paired associates. With the exception of the finding that stable extroverted participants performed better than neurotic introverted participants on an incidental associative-matching task (Experiment 3), the results from the verbal discrimination studies (1-5) did not support the hypothesis. In Experiment 6, the authors tested the hypothesis by using a false-recognition task. False alarms varied as a function of phonetic and semantic stimuli, but personality types were not differentially sensitive to the manipulation. The same was true for the cued-recall studies (Experiments 7 and 8); personality types were not differentially sensitive to the semantic and phonetic stimuli. Experiment 9 (paired-associate learning) was a replication of Schwartz's study. The authors found some support for the Schwartz hypothesis: Extraverted participants were adversely affected by semantic similarity. Overall, the findings did not provide much support for the arousal-accessability hypothesis.     

Hale-Bopp and Handedness: Individual Differences in Memory for Orientation

The accuracy with which a person recalls the orientation of a human figure or head has been shown to depend systematically on the person's handedness. This study investigated whether memory for the orientation of an inanimate object displays a similar effect. In contrast to previous work investigating memory for depictions encountered over many years, the present work focused on memory for a unique event that engaged considerable attention over a relatively brief period—Comet Hale-Bopp. The results showed that although right-handed and left-handed individuals did not differ in their memory for semantic information concerning the comet, they did differ in their memory for its orientation. Right-handed people were significantly more likely than left-handed people both to recall and to recognize the comet as facing to the left. The results suggest that memory performance may be influenced by patterns of underlying cerebral motor activation.     

Habitual Susceptibility to Misinformation and Individual Differences in Eyewitness Memory

A novel multiple-event, multiple-item procedure was employed to identify individuals who were habitually susceptible to accepting post-event misinformation. Using this procedure, it was found that many people succumbed at least once to the effects of misinformation, given enough opportunities. Moreover, some individuals could be identified who showed a pattern of repeated susceptibility, accepting some misinformation for each of three separate events. Several individual difference measures discriminated between individuals who were habitually susceptible to false post-event information and those who were not; these include empathy, self-reported vividness of visual imagery and a memory accuracy measure. © by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Study of Gender Differences in Autobiographical Memory: Broken Down by Age and Sex

Data from 40 older adults who produced autobiographical memories to word cues and to the request to list five important memories, and data from 60 older adults who answered factual multiple-choice questions for events spread across their lives, were analyzed for gender differences. In spite of considerable statistical power, there were no gender differences in the distribution of autobiographical memories over the lifespan, in the distribution of important memories, in various ratings provided to these memories, or in the distribution of knowledge for events. The only gender difference found was that men performed better on factual questions about current events and baseball. Thus, counter to what might be expected from Darwinian theory and some behavioral data, gender differences were minimal.     

Autobiographical Memory Disturbances in Childhood Abuse Survivors

Summary

Clinicians have noted that childhood abuse survivors frequently report that they have forgotten large parts of their childhood. While memory for abusive experiences has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers, other types of memory disturbances may also accompany a history of childhood trauma. Many clinicians report that certain types of sexual abuse, and abuse at certain developmental stages, is more likely to result in reports of gaps in memory for the abuse. However, because information has been mainly collected in clinical populations, the possibility of confounding between abusive experiences and psychological disturbances cannot be ruled out. This article reports on data gathered from a large, epidemiologic study conducted within a health maintenance organization. A history of childhood physical or sexual abuse doubled the prevalence of general autobiographical memory loss for women, while for men, the rate increased 1.5 times over those with no abuse history. Higher rates of autobiographical memory loss were noted where both types of abuse were reported. Further, multiple incidents of sexual abuse, sexual abuse by a relative, and more severe sexual abuse increased reports of autobiographical memory loss. Theoretical perspectives on changes in the memory system that may affect trauma survivors are discussed.     

Studying Individual Differences in Predictability With Gamma Regression and Nonlinear Multilevel Models

Statistical prediction remains an important tool for decisions in a variety of disciplines. An equally important issue is identifying factors that contribute to more or less accurate predictions. The time series literature includes well developed methods for studying predictability and volatility over time. This article develops distribution-appropriate methods for studying individual differences in predictability for settings in psychological research. Specifically, 3 different approaches are discussed for modeling predictability. The 1st is a bivariate measure of predictability discussed previously in the psychology literature, the squared or absolute valued difference between criterion and predictor, which is shown to follow the gamma distribution. The 2nd method extended limitations of previous research and involved understanding predictability in regression models. The 3rd method used nonlinear multilevel models to study predictability in settings where participants are nested within clusters. An application was presented using SAS NLMIXED to understand the predictability of college grade point average by student demographic characteristics. The findings from the application suggest that the 1st-year college performance of English as a second language students were, on average, less predictable whereas females and Whites tended to demonstrate more predictable academic performance than their male or racial/ethnic minority counterparts.     

The Unnoticed Absence of Emotion in Autobiographical Memory

Memory for one's own life experiences, or autobiographical memory, is impressive in its accuracy and flexibility. A memory is constructed anew at each recollection through a process of finding and temporarily joining together specific details about location, sensory experiences, and other details. Curiously missing, however, are emotional details. Although emotional experiences are well remembered, the emotional aspect of an experience is neither retained in its full intensity nor reexperienced during recollection. The adaptive benefits of omitting emotion from autobiographical memory include uninterrupted goal pursuit and emotional stability. But most people make metacognitive errors that convince them that autobiographical memories generally do contain emotion. Possible causes of these errors include naïve theories, motivation to believe that one is healthy, filling in current emotion for remembered emotion, and biased sampling of memories.     

自传记忆的加工机制研究进展

自传记忆是关于个人生活经验的记忆,它有悖于Ehbinghaus的记忆研究传统。在国外．90年代以来自传记忆研究已成为继内隐记忆研究后．记忆领域的又一研究热点。自传记忆加工机制的研究是认知心理学对自传记忆研究的核心领域。本文主要评析了自传记忆的知识表征．自传记忆提取机制的研究进展。目前已有的研究结论是：（1）自传记忆是以个人生活片段知识、一般事件知识和具体事件知识三种方式表征的;（2）自传记忆的提取方式主要通过生成提取和直接提取方式来实现。     

自传记忆事件聚集现象中的组织和提取特点

事件聚集是在事件水平上组织自传记忆的结构,是一种反映自传记忆组织的提取现象.在利用矫正后的事件追随任务对62名成人进行测试后发现:①事件之间各种组织信息并不是分离的,而是以整合的方式来组织事件聚集结构,这些信息不仅包含客体的信息,更包含主观的感受.②自我在自传记忆组织中的作用是强化事件聚集本身所具有的联系.③自传记忆的提取中首先要满足当前自我的要求;进行直接提取失败后,被试根据自传记忆的层级关系进行生成搜索;生成提取策略也失败后,个体则会根据事件线索中任何可以利用的细节来完成回忆任务.     

Individual Differences in Spatial Memory and Striatal ChAT Activity among Young and Aged Rats

Individual differences in spatial memory among young and aged rats were assessed using memory tasks related to integrity of the hippocampus and the neostriatum. Relationships were then examined between measures of spatial memory and regional choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) activity, a marker for cholinergic integrity. Twenty-four-month-old Long-Evans rats were impaired in comparisons with 6-month-old rats on measures of place learning, working memory, reference memory, and perseveration in water-maze tasks. Aged rats that were impaired on one measure of memory, however, were not necessarily impaired on other measures. ChAT activity in the ventromedial and dorsolateral neostriatum of aged rats was significantly reduced in comparisons with young rats whereas no difference was found in the hippocampus. Aged rats with the most ChAT activity in the anterior ventromedial neostriatum performed best on the place-learning and reference memory tasks but also made the most perseverative errors on the working memory task. In addition, young and aged rats with the most ChAT activity in the anterior dorsolateral neostriatum were those with the least accurate working memory. No relationships were found between ChAT activity in the hippocampus and spatial memory. Thus age-related memory impairment has components that can be segregated by measuring relationships between cholinergic integrity in subregions of the anterior neostriatum and memory tasks with different strategic requirements.     

Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity: More Evidence for a General Capacity Theory

The causes of the positive relationship between comprehension and measures of working memory capacity remain unclear. This study tests three hypotheses for the relationship by equating the difficulty, for 48 individual subjects, of processing demands in complex working memory tasks. Even with difficulty of processing equated, the relationship between number of words recalled in the working memory measure and comprehension remained high and significant. The results favour a general capacity view. We suggest that high working memory span subjects have more limited-capacity attentional resources available to them than low span subjects and that individual differences in working memory capacity will have implications for any task that requires controlled effortful processing.     

Individual Differences in How Work and Nonwork Life Domains Contribute to Life Satisfaction: Using Factor Mixture Modeling for Classification

This study used factor mixture modeling to investigate individual differences in how life satisfaction is construed. Referring to the cognitive regulation of well-being we aimed to identify individuals for whom work and nonwork life domains contribute differently to overall life satisfaction. In a sample of 1,704 working adults two subgroups with different response patterns were identified. In the first subgroup work and nonwork life domains contributed equally to overall life satisfaction. In the second subgroup satisfaction with nonwork rather than work-related life domains were important sources of life satisfaction. Furthermore, participants in the second group processed negative affect from the work domain in ways that enabled them to maintain high levels of life satisfaction. We examined the external validity of class assignment and replicated our findings in a second sample. How factor mixture modeling can be used to uncover cognitive mechanisms that operate in evaluations of life satisfaction is discussed.     

Autobiographical Memory in Emerging Adulthood: Relationship with Self-Concept Clarity

Autobiographical memory research documents increased access in the number of memories recalled by emerging adults (ages 18–25) with stable, clearly defined self-concepts. Very little research has examined the relationship between self-concept clarity and the episodic and semantic components of emerging adults’ autobiographical recollections. This study examined the relationship between episodic and semantic autobiographical memory and self-concept clarity in 100 undergraduate students. Contrary to previous findings, which indicated that stable self-beliefs may be used to facilitate access to episodic memories, the results suggested that self-concept clarity may not be associated with memory specificity. Instead, self-concept clarity was associated with recall of events involving cooperative social interactions. Results further showed that older age was associated with higher SCC. The implications of these results are discussed within the context of the theoretical literature concerning the relation between autobiographical memory and the development of the self-concept during emerging adulthood.     

The Effect of Imageability and Predicability of Cues in Autobiographical Memory

Four experiments investigated the role of imagery in the recollection of autobiographical memories. The first two experiments examined the effects of word imageability and word frequency on the retrieval of personal memories in a cued autobiographical memory task. They showed that the imageability of cues (but not frequency) mediates specificity in the recall of personal memories. Experiment 2 explored how different imagery modalities (visual, olfactory, tactile, auditory, and motor) influence autobiographical retrieval. Consistent with research on imagery modalities in verbal learning paradigms, visual imageability emerged as the most significant predictor of specificity. Experiments 3 and 4 examined how far a knowledge-based account of imagery effects might account for these effects, using predicability as a measure of semantic richness of a cue. Results found that visual imageability of cues accounted for more variance in specificity of recall than did predicability. The results are explained in terms of the way images represent the most efficient form of summarizing the information that can be used at each stage of the recollection process: setting the retrieval plan, strategic search, and evaluation of candidate episodes.     

Examining Autobiographical Memory Content in Patients with Depression and Anxiety Disorders

The purpose of this study was to move beyond the traditional specificity model of autobiographical memory (ABM) and to examine the content of memories with a focus on disorder and schema-relevant content. The sample (N = 82) included 25 patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), 24 with social phobia (SP), and 33 with panic disorder with agoraphobia (PDA) who were referred to a large outpatient clinic for group treatment of depression or anxiety. Participants completed the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) and Beck Depression Inventory–II as part of the clinical intake process. Responses to the AMT were coded for disorder-specific content based on diagnostic criteria for each disorder as well as for schema-relevant (sociotropy vs. autonomy) content. A repeated measures multiple analysis of variance demonstrated significant differences in disorder-specific content, with patients in the MDD group reporting more depressotypic ABMs than those in the PDA group but not the SP group. Similarly, in the analysis of schema-relevant content, significant differences were found between MDD and PDA regarding the presence of autonomy-based ABM ratings. Study results provide partial support for the cognitive specificity hypothesis with ABM content. The results are discussed in relation to the cognitive models of depression and anxiety.