Very long‐term recall and recognition of well‐learned material

Three experiments examined very long‐term verbatim memory (from 4 months to 28 years) for lengthy, complex material. Experiments 1 and 2 found that recall (12 and 20 months after the material was last accessed) was at or near ceiling for many participants, and was significantly higher than free‐choice recognition, with recognition failure for recallable words (RF) being observed. The magnitude of the effect corresponded to that predicted by the Tulving–Wiseman ( 1975 ) function. Experiment 3 found that recall was at or near ceiling for 3 years, then declined dramatically as the retention interval increased. However, given equal amounts of context as retrieval cues, forced‐choice recognition remained relatively strong for as long as 28 years. These findings provide evidence of long‐term memory for exact details of complex discourse far in excess of previous demonstrations, and, under certain circumstances, extend the RF phenomenon to lengthy, well‐learned texts over long retention intervals. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Very first impressions

First impressions of people's personalities are often formed by using the visual appearance of their faces. Defining how quickly these impressions can be formed has critical implications for understanding social interactions and for determining the visual properties used to shape them. To study impression formation independent of emotional cues, threat judgments were made on faces with a neutral expression. Consequently, participants' judgments pertained to the personality rather than to a certain temporary emotional state (e.g., anger). The results demonstrate that consistent first impressions can be formed very quickly, based on whatever information is available within the first 39 ms. First impressions were less consistent under these conditions when the judgments were about intelligence, suggesting that survival-related traits are judged more quickly. The authors propose that low spatial frequencies mediate this swift formation of threat judgments and provide evidence that supports this hypothesis.     

Very rapid forgetting

Human forgetting can be much more rapid than previous experiments have indicated. Subjects who do not expect a test after a filled retention interval can rarely recall three consonants correctly after 2 sec of distraction. If there are two kinds of memory, primary and secondary, the present technique provides a purer method of studying forgetting from primary memory.     

Very happy people

A sample of 222 undergraduates was screened for high happiness using multiple confirming assessment filters. We compared the upper 10% of consistently very happy people with average and very unhappy people. The very happy people were highly social, and had stronger romantic and other social relationships than less happy groups. They were more extraverted, more agreeable, and less neurotic, and scored lower on several psychopathology scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Compared with the less happy groups, the happiest respondents did not exercise significantly more, participate in religious activities significantly more, or experience more objectively defined good events. No variable was sufficient for happiness, but good social relations were necessary. Members of the happiest group experienced positive, but not ecstatic, feelings most of the time, and they reported occasional negative moods. This suggests that very happy people do have a functioning emotion system that can react appropriately to life events.     

Overflowing Every Idea of Age, Very Young Children as Educators

In this article I explore if and how very young children can be the educators of their early childhood educators. I describe and discuss a story constructed form a fieldwork done in one early childhood setting in Norway. The story is read with Levinas and his concepts Said and Saying. Further I discuss if and how this might be understood as education arguing that the children`s expressions are offering new beginning and change in the pedagogical thinking and praxis within the early childhood setting.     

‘Very Truly,I Tell You,Before Abraham was,I am’: A Theological Treatise on the Concept of Time in John’s Gospel

This essay analyses temporal peculiarity in John’s Gospel, identified as eschatological and narratological in nature. Part one employs historical‐critical and literary‐critical exegesis to explain the interrelation and function of these peculiarities, while part two derives a temporal metaphysic from the exegesis to explain the concept of time in the Gospel. This exposition is used to make sense of the Gospel’s claim that the one who possesses eternal life will never die. The essay concludes that the Gospel’s future and realised eschatology act as reflections of one another, and argues that the future eschatological scheme functions as a distension of the realised scheme.     

Responsibility,Reactive Attitudes and Very General Facts of Human Nature

This paper defends P.F. Strawson's controversial ‘reversal move’, the view that the reactive attitudes determine what it means to be responsible. Many are critical of this account, arguing that it leads to the result that if we were to start to hold very young children responsible, they would be responsible. I argue that it is possible to read Strawson as providing a grammatical analysis of our moral responsibility language‐game by drawing two parallels between Strawson and Wittgenstein. This interpretation shows that the formulation of the problem associated with the ‘reversal move’ rests on a grammatical mistake.     

“Part of the Very Concept”: Wittgensteinian Moral Philosophy1

X is “part of the very concept” of Y. This formulation recurs throughout Raimond Gaita's philosophy and informs Christopher Cordner's. I elucidate the formulation's meaning and the nature of the necessity posited, then conclude with a criticism. One cannot love evil. One cannot love cow dung. For Gaita, these claims differ in type. The first testifies to a conceptual relation, but the second to a “mere fact.” I see no clear basis for assigning to claims one type over another, which challenges the footing of Wittgensteinian moral philosophy. Why do no moral“mere facts” partly define our form of life?     

Teaching Very Large Classes

The editor of Teaching Theology and Religion facilitated this reflective conversation with five teachers who have extensive experience and success teaching extremely large classes (150 students or more). In the course of the conversation these professors exchange and analyze the effectiveness of several active learning strategies they have employed to overcome the passivity and anonymity of the large lecture format. A major point of debate emerges that contrasts the dynamically performative and highly informed and skilled lecturer with the “wasted time and money” that results from encouraging students to participate through various active learning strategies. Other themes include the importance of story telling in the religious studies classroom, the significance of the differences between students' learning styles, and the challenge of teaching and assessing critical thinking and communication skills.     

Very short-term conceptual memory

Short-term memory for conceptual information is largely missing from current models of short-term memory. Several phenomena are discussed that give evidence for very brief conceptual representations of stimuli. Although these fleeting representations do not surface readily with many of the standard methods for studying and testing short-term memory, I argue that they are fundamental to cognitive processing and to the form that long-term memory takes.