Predispositional Engagement,Activity Engagement,and Cognition among Older Adults

ABSTRACT

We investigated interrelationships between the predisposition toward approaching experiences in a mindful and creative way, participation in specific activities, and cognition among older adults. Participants were administered a battery measuring cognition (i.e., working memory, processing speed, divergent thinking, inductive reasoning, visuo-spatial processing), activity level, and the predisposition towards mental engagement (Need for Cognition, Mindfulness, and Openness to Experience). Results indicated that predispositional engagement and activity engagement are distinct constructs that independently contribute to different aspects of fluid ability, highlighting the importance of considering both the predisposition toward mental engagement as well as the habitual tendency to participate in activities when exploring principles of cognitive optimization.     

Distributed memory and the representation of general and specific information

We describe a distributed model of information processing and memory and apply it to the representation of general and specific information. The model consists of a large number of simple processing elements which send excitatory and inhibitory signals to each other via modifiable connections. Information processing is thought of as the process whereby patterns of activation are formed over the units in the model through their excitatory and inhibitory interactions. The memory trace of a processing event is the change or increment to the strengths of the interconnections that results from the processing event. The traces of separate events are superimposed on each other in the values of the connection strengths that result from the entire set of traces stored in the memory. The model is applied to a number of findings related to the question of whether we store abstract representations or an enumeration of specific experiences in memory. The model simulates the results of a number of important experiments which have been taken as evidence for the enumeration of specific experiences. At the same time, it shows how the functional equivalent of abstract representations--prototypes, logogens, and even rules--can emerge from the superposition of traces of specific experiences, when the conditions are right for this to happen. In essence, the model captures the structure present in a set of input patterns; thus, it behaves as though it had learned prototypes or rules, to the extent that the structure of the environment it has learned about can be captured by describing it in terms of these abstractions.     

Historical Inquiry to Challenge the Narrative of Racial Progress

This article explores how a curricular intervention that merges antiessentialist historical content and historical inquiry plays a role in how students complicate the narrative of racial progress. The 3-day curricular intervention centers on Mendez v. Westminster, a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation. The content and historical inquiry activities explore how (a) Mexican Americans claimed legal Whiteness to gain access to better schools and (b) how Mendez upheld race and language-based segregation. This article outlines how students engage in 4 levels of historical analysis: evidenceless claims, emerging complexity, relational analysis, and multidimensionality. In each type of analysis, students use the antiessentialist historical content to complicate the narrative of racial progress. They highlight, to different degrees, how racial discriminatory policies adapt to continue upholding discrimination. With the antiessentialist historical content in place, the narrative of racial progress functioned as a template, not to emulate but, rather, as a point of comparison. It encouraged students to engage in a complex analysis where they considered how Mendez was an incomplete victory. This research provides insight into levels of analysis that up to now have mostly been theoretical. The larger lesson here, as it applies to how educators teach history, is that (a) the experiences of people of color cannot be essentialized, (b) inquiry can be a useful tool in encouraging historical reasoning that considers such racial/ethnic nuance, and (c) collective memory might be leveraged to encourage students to develop such relational analysis.     

PTSD and the influence of context: The self as a social mirror

The principal accepted models of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are based on both memory processing and biological/brain changes occurring when one's life or well-being is threatened. It is our thesis that these models would be greatly informed by community studies indicating that PTSD is predicted to a greater extent by earlier life experience and experiences that occur distant from the threatening event. These findings suggest posttraumatic responding is best conceptualized through the lens of the self-in-context, as opposed to imprinting that results from a given event at a given time. Moreover, studies of non-Western populations often do not express trauma as PTSD, or at least not primarily as PTSD, which argues against specific neural or memory encoding processes, but rather for a more plastic neural process that is shaped by experience and how the self develops in its cultural context, as a product of a broad array of experiences. We posit that fear and emotional conditioning as well as the ways traumas are encoded in memory are only partial explanatory mechanisms for trauma responding, and that issues of safety and harm, which are long term and developmental, are the common and principal underpinnings of the occurrence of posttraumatic distress, including PTSD.     

Sleep preferentially enhances memory for emotional components of scenes

ABSTRACT— Central aspects of emotional experiences are often well remembered at the expense of background details. Previous studies of such memory trade-offs have focused on memory after brief delays, but little is known about how these components of emotional memories change over time. We investigated the evolution of memory for negative scenes across 30 min, 12 daytime hours spent awake, and 12 nighttime hours including sleep. After 30 min, negative objects were well remembered at the expense of information about their backgrounds. Time spent awake led to forgetting of the entire negative scene, with memories of objects and their backgrounds decaying at similar rates. Sleep, in contrast, led to a preservation of memories of negative objects, but not their backgrounds, a result suggesting that the two components undergo differential processing during sleep. Memory for a negative scene develops differentially across time delays containing sleep and wake, with sleep selectively consolidating those aspects of memory that are of greatest value to the organism.     

Adaptive memory: nature's criterion and the functionalist agenda

Memory researchers traditionally ignore function in favor of largely structural analyses. For example, it is well known that forming a visual image improves retention, and various proximate mechanisms have been proposed to account for the advantage (e.g., elaboration of the memory trace), but next to nothing is known about why memory evolved such sensitivities. Why did nature craft a memory system that is sensitive to imagery or the processing of meaning? Functional analyses are critical to progress in memory research for two main reasons: First, as in applied research, functional analyses provide the necessary criteria for measuring progress; second, there are good reasons to believe that modern cognitive processes continue to bear the imprint of ancestral selection pressures (i.e., cognitive systems are functionally designed). We review empirical evidence supporting the idea that memory evolved to enhance reproductive fitness; as a consequence, to maximize retention in basic and applied settings it is useful to develop encoding techniques that are congruent with the natural design of memory systems.     

Positive or Negative Effects of Technology Enhancement for Brand Placements? Memory of Brand Placements in 2D, 3D,and 4D Movies

Brand placements in movies are common throughout the world. Within the last few years, 3D movie technology has experienced substantial growth in both cinemas and home entertainment. Furthermore, advanced cinemas also offer 4D experiences by adding scent, airflow or tactile stimuli to the 3D film. Based on the limited capacity model of information processing and the levels of processing effect theory, we conduct two studies to investigate how delivery modes of a 2D movie clip, compared to a 3D and a 4D (3D + scent) movie clip, influence recall and recognition of brands that are placed in either prominent or subtle ways. With regard to subtle placements, results from both studies demonstrate that the memory of subtle brand placements is negatively affected by the enhancement offered by 3D or 4D, as compared to 2D movies. With regard to prominent placements, results indicate that the memory of a highly prominent brand placement benefits from 3D, but not from 4D technology. This article addresses implications for research as well as for marketers and movie makers, while also outlining directions for further research.     

Auditory memory can be object based

Identifying how memories are organized remains a fundamental issue in psychology. Previous work has shown that visual short-term memory is organized according to the object of origin, with participants being better at retrieving multiple pieces of information from the same object than from different objects. However, it is not yet clear whether similar memory structures are employed for other modalities, such as audition. Under analogous conditions in the auditory domain, we found that short-term memories for sound can also be organized according to object, with a same-object advantage being demonstrated for the retrieval of information in an auditory scene defined by two complex sounds overlapping in both space and time. Our results provide support for the notion of an auditory object, in addition to the continued identification of similar processing constraints across visual and auditory domains. The identification of modality-independent organizational principles of memory, such as object-based coding, suggests possible mechanisms by which the human processing system remembers multimodal experiences.     

Visual long-term memory is not unitary: Flexible storage of visual information as features or objects as a function of affect

Research has shown that observers store surprisingly highly detailed long-term memory representations of visual objects after only a single viewing. However, the nature of these representations is currently not well understood. In particular, it may be that the nature of such memory representations is not unitary but reflects the flexible operating of two separate memory subsystems: a feature-based subsystem that stores visual experiences in the form of independent features, and an object-based subsystem that stores visual experiences in the form of coherent objects. Such an assumption is usually difficult to test, because overt memory responses reflect the joint output of both systems. Therefore, to disentangle the two systems, we (1) manipulated the affective state of observers (negative vs. positive) during initial object perception, to introduce systematic variance in the way that visual experiences are stored, and (2) measured both the electrophysiological activity at encoding (via electroencephalography) and later feature memory performance for the objects. The results showed that the nature of stored memory representations varied qualitatively as a function of affective state. Negative affect promoted the independent storage of object features, driven by preattentive brain activities (feature-based memory representations), whereas positive affect promoted the dependent storage of object features, driven by attention-related brain activities (object-based memory representations). Taken together, these findings suggest that visual long-term memory is not a unitary phenomenon. Instead, incoming information can be stored flexibly by means of two qualitatively different long-term memory subsystems, based on the requirements of the current situation.     

The role of frequency of experience with a product category and temporal orientation in self‐referent advertising

Previous research conceptualized consumers' evaluations of self-referent advertisements as discrete episodic processing instances requiring the ad-hoc matching of ad and personal knowledge detail. The present research proposes that consumers with frequent (infrequent) experiences in a product category are primarily semantic (episodic) processors. Consequently, consumers with frequent experiences have an illusion of detail matching in retrospective self-referencing resulting from schema-driven memory intrusions induced by highly detailed ads. Alternatively, consumers with infrequent experiences exhibit intrusions in anticipatory self-referencing due to imagination inflation prompted by these ads. Two experiments demonstrate how consumer knowledge-based details interact with message details in retrospective and anticipatory self-referencing situations to alter ad evaluations depending on the extent of prior experience.     

Investigating the Awareness of Remembering

ABSTRACT— There is a marked lack of consensus concerning the best way to learn how conscious experiences arise. In this article, we advocate for scientific approaches that attempt to bring together four types of phenomena and their corresponding theoretical accounts: behavioral acts, cognitive events, neural events, and subjective experience. We propose that the key challenge is to comprehensively specify the relationships among these four facets of the problem of understanding consciousness without excluding any facet. Although other perspectives on consciousness can also be informative, combining these four perspectives could lead to significant progress in explaining a conscious experience such as remembering. We summarize some relevant findings from cognitive neuroscience investigations of the conscious experience of memory retrieval and of memory behaviors that transpire in the absence of the awareness of remembering. These examples illustrate suitable scientific strategies for making progress in understanding consciousness by developing and testing theories that connect the behavioral expression of recall and recognition, the requisite cognitive transactions, the neural events that make remembering possible, and the awareness of remembering.     

Cognitive resources, valence, and memory retrieval of emotional events in older adults

In 2 studies with older adults, the authors investigated the effect of executive attention resources on the retrieval of emotional public events. Participants completed a battery of working memory tasks, as a measure of executive attention, and a battery of tasks assessing memory, as well as subjective experiences associated with the retrieval of remote public events. Participants also rated the valence of each public event story. The group-rated valence of the public event stories predicted retrieval and the quality of experiences associated with them, such that emotionally arousing events elicited the highest memory rates and the richest experiences. Furthermore, positive public events elicited the highest memory rates. Executive attention moderated only the relationship between event valence and how participants' associated memories are experienced at retrieval, such that superior executive attention resources predicted richer experiences associated with positive relative to neutral and negative stories. The current results extend previous findings on the effects of aging on emotion regulation, suggesting that cognitive control resources modulate subjective experiences associated with retrieved memories for remote real life events, but not memory retrieval itself. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).     

Neurophysiological evidence for transfer appropriate processing of memory: Processing versus feature similarity

Transfer appropriate processing (TAP) accounts propose that memory is a function of the degree to which the same neural processes transfer appropriately from the study experience to the memory test. However, in prior research, study and test stimuli were often similar physically. In two experiments, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to fragmented objects during an indirect memory test to isolate transfer of a specific perceptual process from overlap of physical features between experiences. An occipitotemporoparietal P2(00) at 200 msec showed implicit memory effects only when similar perceptual grouping processes of good continuation were repeatedly engaged—despite physical feature differences—as TAP accounts hypothesize. This result provides direct neurophysiological evidence for the critical role of process transfer across experiences for memory.     

Post-traumatic stress disorder: A congnitive-contextural approach

Most people are psychologically effected by an extreme trauma and for a significant minority the debility is long term, often expressed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A cognitive-contextual approach is described in which the prime focus is upon teaching the client how to interact adaptively with the memory of the trauma by: a) facilitating a switch from a primarily perceptual to a more conceptual level of processing the trauma itself; and b) placing the trauma in the context of past life experiences and determining its relevance for the future. The approach is illustrated by the treatment of a PTSD diagnosed motor vehicle accident victim.     

Memory reactivations during sleep: a neural basis of dream experiences?

Newly encoded memory traces are spontaneously reactivated during sleep. Since their discovery in the 1990s, these memory reactivations have been discussed as a potential neural basis for dream experiences. New results from animal and human research, as well as from the rapidly growing field of sleep and dream engineering, provide essential insights into this question, and reveal both strong parallels and disparities between the two phenomena. We suggest that, although memory reactivations may contribute to subjective experiences across different states of consciousness, they are not likely to be the primary neural basis of dreaming. We identify important limitations in current research paradigms and suggest novel strategies to address this question empirically.     

Making the most of information‐gathering interviews with children

Because child abuse victims are often the only available sources of information about their experiences, extensive efforts have been made to understand how to maximize their informativeness. There is now broad international consensus regarding optimal interview practices, and broad awareness that children's informativeness increases when interviewers conduct developmentally appropriate interviews with children. In this paper, we (1) summarize current understanding of how children remember, retrieve, and communicate information and (2) discuss ways in which children's memory and reporting can be fostered using techniques designed to help children recount past experiences such as the Cognitive Interview, the Narrative Elaboration Technique, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development‐Protocol. Communicative success clearly depends on how well children understand their role and how effectively interviewers take advantage of children's competencies and abilities to help them maximize their informativeness. Unfortunately, agreement regarding ways in which interviews should be conducted has not been paralleled by changes in the way interviews are actually conducted in the field and more attention thus needs to be paid to training and implementation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The influence of stress hormones on emotional memory: relevance for psychopathology

Substantial progress within recent years has led to a better understanding of the impact of stress on emotional memory. These effects are of relevance for understanding and treating psychopathology. The present selective review describes how emotional memory is modulated through stress hormones. Acute as well as chronic effects are discussed and information from rodent models is compared to human experimental studies and clinical observations. Finally, the relevance of these findings for emotional memory disturbances in psychiatric disorders is exemplified by discussions on neuroendocrine alterations in depression, post traumatic stress disorder and phobias.     

Stimulation cognitive chez les personnes âgées : effets d’une méthode de stimulation cognitive par les jeux sur les fonctions cognitives et l’estime de soi

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a cognitive stimulation program with games on scores to cognitive tests (processing speed, mental flexibility, working memory, inhibition) and how this program can benefit to a psycho-affective measure, self-esteem in older adults. Forty-eight participants over 60 years old took part in the experiment. They were divided into two groups: 1 group followed a program of cognitive stimulation using leisure activities with games and 1 control group in which people gathered every week. There were 8 sessions of cognitive stimulation using leisure activities like games, one-hour session a week. Measures have focused on speed of processing and executive functions (shifting, updating and inhibition). They have been evaluated before and after the training program. Results show that the cognitive stimulation program using leisure activities with games is effective on speed of processing, memory span, inhibition and self-esteem but shows no benefits on shifting and updating. These results indicate that it seems to be possible to enhance cognitive resources, inhibition and self-esteem using leisure activities with games as a tool for cognitive stimulation.     

Does working memory training lead to generalized improvements in children with low working memory? A randomized controlled trial

Children with low working memory typically make poor educational progress, and it has been speculated that difficulties in meeting the heavy working memory demands of the classroom may be a contributory factor. Intensive working memory training has been shown to boost performance on untrained memory tasks in a variety of populations. This first randomized controlled trial with low working memory children investigated whether the benefits of training extend beyond standard working memory tasks to other more complex activities typical of the classroom in which working memory plays a role, as well as to other cognitive skills and developing academic abilities. Children aged 7–9 years received either adaptive working memory training, non‐adaptive working memory training with low memory loads, or no training. Adaptive training was associated with selective improvements in multiple untrained tests of working memory, with no evidence of changes in classroom analogues of activities that tax working memory, or any other cognitive assessments. Gains in verbal working memory were sustained one year after training. Thus the benefits of working memory training delivered in this way may not extend beyond structured working memory tasks.