Actively Controlling Anticipation of Irregular Events

There have been no investigations as to how people respond to sequences of events which occur at brief, unpredictable intervals as in everyday life. Eleven young adults were practised at a two-choice, continuous, serial choice-response task in which intervals between each response and the onset of the next signal (RSIs) varied randomly from trial to trial. On half the trials in each of four conditions the RSI was 20 ms, and on the other trials 200, 400, 800 and 1600 ms respectively. Reaction times fell as RSIs increased from 20-200 ms but thereafter appeared to be unaffected by RSI duration. In the 20/200 and 20/400 ms RSI conditions RT was not affected by transitions between different RSIs but in the 20/800 and 20/1600 ms conditions RTs were faster when the longer RSI recurred on immediately successive trials than if the long RSI followed the short (20 ms) RSI. These results are discussed in terms of a control system model for the way in which subjects actively trade off between their internal performance limitations to optimally meet task demands.     

Interviewer Knowledge and Preschoolers' Reasoning About Knowledge States Moderate Suggestibility

Fifty-one preschoolers listened to a story and were interviewed about the details by a knowledgeable and a naı̈ve interviewer. Half the questions were straightforward and half were misleading. One-week later, children completed a recognition test to measure story memory and a set of theory-of-mind tasks to measure reasoning about mental states related to knowing. All children showed a misinformation effect at the initial interview. At the recognition test, a knowledgeable interviewer misled children who passed false-belief tasks more often than a naı̈ve interviewer did. Knowledgeable and naı̈ve interviewers misled children who failed false-belief tasks equally often. False-belief scores predicted the tendency to be misled more often by a knowledgeable interviewer relative to a naı̈ve interviewer, after controlling for age and memory when not misled. Elaborated cognitive processing and/or memory source monitoring may mediate the results.     

Preschoolers' Acquisition of Scientific Vocabulary Through Repeated Read-Aloud Events,Retellings, and Hands-On Science Activities

This study explored 3- and 4-year-old children's development of scientific vocabulary from participation in repeated interactive read-aloud events and retellings of three informational picture books about light and color, followed by hands-on science activities. Thirty-two children attending a YWCA preschool were matched by age and general vocabulary knowledge and randomly assigned to a retelling or no retelling condition. Repeated measures ANOVA of pretest and posttest scores on a free recall target vocabulary test revealed significantly higher scores for 4-year-olds, those with higher vocabulary knowledge, and those who retold the books. Children used significantly more target words across the three retellings.     

Anticipation and Source-Monitoring Errors: Children's Memory for Collaborative Activities

When asked to remember who contributed what to the completion of shared, goal-directed activities, children exhibit a bias to over-attribute contributions to themselves, recoding partners' actions as their own. The goals of the 3 experiments reported here were to explore task characteristics that might influence these recoding processes, and as a result, reveal more about them. The timing of the child's contributions in relation to the partner's actions was found to be crucial for recoding (Experiments 1 and 3). The availability of a model outcome affects recoding as well (Experiment 2), but appears not to be a prerequisite. In the absence of a physical outcome, recoding is still observed (Experiment 3). Anticipation of the partner's actions appears to account for all of these effects. Findings have implications for understanding children's source monitoring abilities as well as for understanding internalization processes thought to support collaborative learning.     

Memory editing: Knowledge, criteria, and alignment

Within this article, a general organisational framework for this special issue of Memory is provided. The organising structure is based on a straightforward hypothesis that editing mechanisms are based on three independent constructs: knowledge, criteria, and alignment. Supporting evidence for this general framework taken from the literature generally, and this special issue of Memory specifically, is reviewed. In the concluding section, future directions for research in the area of memory editing are outlined.     

Multiple Organisations of Events in Memory

Theories of memory organisation propose that activity knowledge organises autobiographical memory globally. According to these views, memories that share a participant, location, or time are only organised together if they also share an activity. If they do not, they are nested within their respective activity organisations locally rather than being organised together globally. Two experiments that assessed people's clustering of laboratory events consistently obtained findings that contradict this view. Both experiments found that people organise event memories globally in non-activity clusters, cross-classify events into multiple organisations, and pivot between activity and non-activity clusters. Consistent with studies of naturalistic events, these studies of laboratory events indicate that people crossclassify event memories simultaneously into multiple global organisations.     

The Problem of Memory Knowledge

When one recalls that P, how is one justified in believing that P? I refute the three most natural answers to this question: a memory belief is not justified by a belief in the reliability of memory; a memory experience does not provide a new, foundational justification for a belief; and memory does not merely preserve the same justification a belief had when first adopted. Instead, the justification of a memory belief is a product of both the initial justification for adopting it and the justification for retaining it provided by seeming memories.     

Memory for the Events of Early Childhood

There has been much recent interest in the phenomenon of childhood amnesia, the difficulty most adults have in recalling at least the first 3 years of life. In contrast, it has been shown that infants 18 months of age or less can retain information over long periods. Although there is no agreed-upon explanation of this paradoxical phenomenon, there are proposed biological, cognitive, and social-cognitive explanations. Distinguishing among these accounts involves investigating both adults' memories for childhood events and the mnemonicabilities of young children. These studies may not only reveal the reason why our earliest years are shrouded from us as adults, but also shed light on the memory processes that allow us a rich representation of the remainder of our personal past.     

Contrasting Memory for Temporal-Source and Memory for Content in Children's Discrimination of Repeated Events

The current studies examined the separate roles that memory of temporal-source and memory of content play in children's discrimination of occurrences of a repeated event. The studies were also designed to determine the impact of age and retention interval on each of these components. In Experiment One, 4- to 5- versus 6- to 8-year-old children experienced six occurrences of a repeated event; each occurrence had the same underlying structure; however, a different version or instantiation of each item was included in each occurrence of the event. At either 1 or 6 week delay, the children were asked to recall which instantiation of the item was included in the final occurrence. In Experiment Two, children were required to recall as many instantiations as they could, prior to making a decision about which instantiation was included in the final occurrence. The results indicated that: (a) children's capacity to correctly identify the final instantiation declined over time and increased with age; (b) children's capacity to provide an instantiation that was temporally close to the final occurrence declined over time and increased with age; and (c) children's ability to remember the source of an instantiation decreased over time irrespective of any loss of memory for content. The results were discussed in relation to current theories of memory and children's eyewitness memory. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children''s Memory and Source Monitoring of Real-Life and Televised Events

It is theoretically and practically important to know whether children confuse memories of different events to which they have been exposed. In two studies, children aged 4 and 10 years watched two related events; one event was live and the other was a video recording. Half of the children watched a video that was similar to the live event, and the remaining children watched a video that was dissimilar. One week later, children in the similar condition confused the two events more than those in the different condition when freely recalling (Experiments 1 and 2) and in response to focused questions (Experiment 1). The 10-year olds reported more information than the 4-year olds and were more accurate overall, confusing the events less than the 4-year olds. When the events were presented 1 day after each other (Experiment 2), the reports were more inaccurate than when the events were separated by a 2-day interval, but this did not affect the number of times the events were confused. The results suggest that mere exposure to similar events in different media can contaminate memories, and the findings are discussed in relation to children's source monitoring and eyewitness memory.     

Working Memory for Temporal and Nontemporal Events in Monkeys

This is the first report that introduces appropriate behavioral tasks for monkeys for investigations of working memory for temporal and nontemporal events. Using several behavioral tests, the study also shows how temporal information is coded during retention intervals in the tasks. Each of three monkeys was trained with two working memory tasks: delayed matching-to-sample of stimulus duration (DMS-D) and delayed matching-to-sample of stimulus color (DMS-C). The two tasks employed an identical apparatus and responses and differed only in the temporal and nontemporal attribute of the stimuli to be retained for correct performance. When a retention interval between the sample and comparison stimuli was prolonged, the monkeys made more incorrect responses to short samples in the DMS-C task, suggesting “trace decay” of memory for short stimuli. However, the same monkeys showed no such increase in incorrect responses to short samples in the DMS-D task, suggesting active coding of temporal information, that is, the length of stimulus duration, during the retention interval. When variable lengths of samples were presented with a fixed retention interval, the monkeys made more incorrect responses when length differences between short and long samples were small in the DMS-D task, but not in the DMS-C task. This suggests that the codes of working memory retained in the DMS-D task were not absolute (analogical) but rather were relative (categorical) and related to differences in the duration of the samples.     

The Role of Typical and Atypical Events in Story Memory

To understand how viewers or readers process and remember media narratives such as entertainment, news, and information is critical to our understanding of the mental processing of television and other media. Media stories contain both typical and atypical events and people, but little is known about how readers or viewers process and remember these two types of information. Participants in 2 experiments remembered atypical story items much better even a week later. However, the conservative way they treated atypical memories could give the illusion that typical items are better remembered than they really are. The results have implications for both mass media theory and theories of memory.     

Drug Tolerance, Drug Addiction, and Drug Anticipation

ABSTRACT— Environmental cues associated with drugs often elicit withdrawal symptoms and relapse to drug use. Such cues also modulate drug tolerance. The contribution of drug-associated stimuli to withdrawal and tolerance is emphasized in a Pavlovian-conditioning analysis of drug administration. Conditional responses occur in the presence of cues that have been associated with the drug in the past, such as the setting in which the drug was taken. These conditional responses mediate the expression of tolerance and withdrawal symptoms. Recently, it has become apparent that internal predrug cues, as well as environmental cues, elicit pharmacological conditional responses that contribute to tolerance and withdrawal. Such internal cues include cognitive or proprioceptive cues incidental to self-administration, drug-onset cues that are experienced shortly after administration, and emotional cues. According to the conditioning analysis, addiction treatment should incorporate learning principles to extinguish the association between stimuli (environmental and internal) present at the time of drug administration and the effects of the addictive drug.     

幼儿元认知"乐观主义现象"研究述评

儿童元认知发展是当代发展心理学研究的热点领域之一,其中儿童对自身能力的认识与评估又是研究者很感兴趣的课题。大量研究表明,与年长儿童和成人相比,年幼儿童特别是学龄前儿童往往对自己的能力和在各种任务中的成绩作出不切实际的高估,这种高估具有跨领域的一致性,并且具有内在固执性,即通常不受过去失败经验的影响。这就是所谓幼儿元认知“乐观主义现象”。本文对这一领域的相关研究进行整体回顾与分析,并在此基础上尝试对这一现象产生的原因及影响因素作出解释和说明。     

A Longitudinal Study of Interparental Conflict, Emotional and Behavioral Reactivity, and Preschoolers' Adjustment Problems among Low-Income Families

Researchers have begun to develop models that explain the processes by which interparental conflict impacts children's adjustment. The present study tested a model based on emotional security theory. The longitudinal relations among interparental conflict, boys' reactions to conflict, and internalizing and externalizing problems were examined in a sample of 129 mother–son dyads from low-income, 2-parent families from the time sons were age 2 to 5. Results indicated that children exposed to interparental conflict were more likely to have concurrent and later behavior problems and that patterns of interparental conflict across time made unique contributions in predicting later problems. Children's emotional reactivity in response to conflict had no direct relation to interparental conflict and only modest relations to behavior problems. However, interparental conflict and reactivity factors interacted to predict behavior problems at ages 3 1/2 and 5. Thus, some support was demonstrated for emotional reactivity as a moderator in the development of young children's behavior problems.     

Preschoolers' use of dynamic facial, bodily, and vocal cues to emotion

In daily experience, children have access to a variety of cues to others’ emotions, including face, voice, and body posture. Determining which cues they use at which ages will help to reveal how the ability to recognize emotions develops. For happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, preschoolers (3-5 years, N = 144) were asked to label the emotion conveyed by dynamic cues in four cue conditions. The Face-only, Body Posture-only, and Multi-cue (face, body, and voice) conditions all were well recognized (M > 70%). In the Voice-only condition, recognition of sadness was high (72%), but recognition of the three other emotions was significantly lower (34%).     

Preschoolers' Magical Explanations for Violations of Physical,Social, and Mental Laws

In 2 experiments we explored young preschoolers' knowledge of constraints on human action by presenting them with violations of different types of law and asking whether the violations required magic. In Experiment 1, children responded that physical violations required magic more than did social violations. In Experiment 2, violations were presented in pairs and included violations of "mental law." Again, children's "magic" responses were higher for physical than for social violations. Older children also differentiated between mental and social violations. It is concluded that (a) young preschoolers realize that physical constraint is importantly different from social constraint, and (b) children understand that constraints on mental activities are also different from those that operate in the social realm; this understanding develops during the preschool years.