When does prior knowledge disproportionately benefit older adults’ memory?

Material consistent with knowledge/experience is generally more memorable than material inconsistent with knowledge/experience – an effect that can be more extreme in older adults. Four experiments investigated knowledge effects on memory with young and older adults. Memory for familiar and unfamiliar proverbs (Experiment 1) and for common and uncommon scenes (Experiment 2) showed similar knowledge effects across age groups. Memory for person-consistent and person-neutral actions (Experiment 3) showed a greater benefit of prior knowledge in older adults. For cued recall of related and unrelated word pairs (Experiment 4), older adults benefited more from prior knowledge only when it provided uniquely useful additional information beyond the episodic association itself. The current data and literature suggest that prior knowledge has the age-dissociable mnemonic properties of (1) improving memory for the episodes themselves (age invariant), and (2) providing conceptual information about the tasks/stimuli extrinsically to the actual episodic memory (particularly aiding older adults).     

Centrality ratings,forensic relevance,and production frequency: Which one best identifies central and peripheral items?

Production frequency has often been used to identify central and peripheral information, under the assumption that high frequency implies that the item is central. However, no research to date has tested the relationship between centrality and frequency. Participants watched a video of a bank robbery and completed a free recall test, from which frequency for recalled items was computed. Two groups then watched the same video and rated centrality and forensic relevance for each item. Results showed that most, but not all, items with high frequency were rated as central and forensically relevant but that low frequency items were not diagnostic of either item centrality or forensic relevance. Forensic relevance was a better indicator of item centrality than frequency. We concluded that frequency measures should be avoided to determine centrality. Also, if centrality ratings cannot be collected, forensic relevance ratings may be more appropriate for this purpose.     

The effects of repeatedly recalling a traumatic event on eyewitness memory and suggestibility

ABSTRACT

The aims of this study were to examine the effects of repeatedly recalling a traumatic event on recall performance and eyewitness suggestibility. We also investigated whether these effects were moderated by the type of details recalled and the completeness of retrieval. Participants watched a video depicting a fatal car accident and were randomly allocated to one of four conditions in which they: (1) repeatedly recalled the traumatic (central) details of the event only (trauma-focused); (2) repeatedly recalled the non-traumatic (peripheral) details of the event only (non-trauma focused); (3) repeatedly recalled the entire video (complete); or (4) did not recall the video at all (no-recall control). Results indicated that repeated complete recall was beneficial for memory retention of the entire traumatic event and that, in general, trauma-related (central) post-event information (PEI) was less likely to be reported than trauma-unrelated (peripheral) PEI. It was also found that repeated trauma-focused recall increased trauma-related confabulations. These results not only illustrate the value of repeated complete recall to best preserve the integrity of eyewitness memory, but, perhaps more critically, warn of the dangers of repeatedly questioning witnesses specifically about the central or traumatic details of an event.     

Developmental changes in self-corrected elaboration effects on incidental memory

Abstract:  Two experiments were carried out to investigate the changes across age groups in the effects of self-corrected elaboration on incidental memory. Each participant performed an orienting task involving three conditions: self-corrected, self-generated and experimenter-provided elaboration. The orienting task was followed by free recall tests. In Experiment 1, the participants were sixth-grade and second-grade students. For sixth-grade students the self-corrected elaboration led to a better free recall than the other two elaborations, whereas for the second-grade students, no difference was observed between any of the three elaborations. In Experiment 2, using a longer word list than that in Experiment 1, the participants were undergraduates. The self-corrected and self-generated elaborations led to a better free recall than the experimenter-provided elaboration, and no difference between the former two elaborations was observed. The results obtained from these two experiments were interpreted as showing that the effectiveness of a self-corrected elaboration depends on the participants' age.     

A study of retrieval processes in action memory for school-aged children: the impact of recall period and difficulty on action memory

ABSTRACT

Research in action memory for adults has shown that enacted encoding is not only retrieved more frequently but is also faster in comparison to verbal encoding. The aim of this study was to investigate retrieval processes in terms of recall period and recall difficulty for different encoding conditions in school-aged children (8-, 10-, 12-, 14-years old). The participants studied verbal tasks, subject-performed tasks and experimenter-performed tasks, and received immediate and final free-recall tests. The results revealed that older children not only outperformed younger children in terms of accuracy but also outpaced them in all recall periods. Moreover, recalls of subject-performed tasks and experimenter-performed tasks were better and faster compared with verbal encoding on both types of recall test, by increasing throughout the recall periods. These results are discussed in terms of memory strategies and information processing methods. Pedagogic implications for the use of action memory in children's learning are also considered.     

A Distributed Representation of Temporal Context

The principles of recency and contiguity are two cornerstones of the theoretical and empirical analysis of human memory. Recency has been alternatively explained by mechanisms of decay, displacement, and retroactive interference. Another account of recency is based on the idea of variable context (Estes, 1955; Mensink & Raaijmakers, 1989). Such notions are typically cast in terms of a randomly fluctuating population of elements reflective of subtle changes in the environment or in the subjects' mental state. This random context view has recently been incorporated into distributed and neural network memory models (Murdock, 1997; Murdock, Smith, & Bai, 2001). Here we propose an alternative model. Rather than being driven by random fluctuations, this formulation, the temporal context model (TCM), uses retrieval of prior contextual states to drive contextual drift. In TCM, retrieved context is an inherently asymmetric retrieval cue. This allows the model to provide a principled explanation of the widespread advantage for forward recalls in free and serial recall. Modeling data from single-trial free recall, we demonstrate that TCM can simultaneously explain recency and contiguity effects across time scales.