A comparison of item and source forgetting

The purpose of the present research was to compare memory for an item with memory for the item’s source. Experiment 1 investigated discrimination between two external sources: each item in a list of words was spoken in either a male or a female voice. Subjects received a test of item recognition and a test of source monitoring at each of four delay intervals (immediate, 30 min, 48 h, 1 week). In contrast with previous research, no evidence of differential forgetting rates for item and source information was found. With delay intervals of 0 and 48 h, Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 while adding a reality monitoring condition that required discrimination between an internal (i.e., self-generated) and an external source. Subjects were better at making internal-external discriminations than at making external-external discriminations, but both types of source monitoring declined at the same rate as memory for the items themselves.     

Why g is not an adaptation: a comment on Kanazawa (2004)

In S. Kanazawa's evolutionary theory of general intelligence (g), g is presented as a species-typical information-processing mechanism. This conceptualization of g departs radically from the accepted conceptualization of g as a source of individual differences that is manifest in the positive manifold. Kanazawa's theory is thus problematic in the sense that it concerns a purely hypothetical, and empirically unsupported, conceptualization of g. The authors argue that an evolutionary account of g should address it as a source of individual differences--that is, in a manner that is consistent with the empirical support for g.     

Adult age differences in visual word identification: functional neuroanatomy by positron emission tomography

Adult age differences in the neural systems mediating semantic (context-independent) memory were investigated using positron emission tomography (PET). Younger (20-29 years) and older (62-70 years) participants performed lexical decision (word/nonword discrimination) and nonsemantic (simple visual search) baseline tasks during PET scanning. Within the lexical decision task, display duration and presentation rate were varied across scans. The behavioral data suggested that although an age-related slowing was evident in visual feature and response processing, the retrieval of semantic/lexical information was similar for younger and older adults. For both age groups, lexical-related activation occurred in inferior prefrontal and occipitotemporal regions of the left hemisphere. Differential activation, as a function of age group, was observed in the left occipitotemporal pathway as a result of older adults' maintaining higher levels of neural activity in striate cortex (during visual search) and in inferior temporal cortex (during lexical decision). The prefrontal activation was similar for the two age groups. Thus, although this form of semantic memory retrieval does not undergo significant age-related decline, an age-related change in the associated pattern of neural activation is evident. These findings differ from previous neuroimaging studies of episodic (context-dependent) memory retrieval, which have suggested that age-related compensatory mechanisms are expressed primarily by greater activation of prefrontal regions for older adults than for younger adults.     

Distal cues and latent extinction

The Psychological Record - The hypothesis was tested that the failure of Bugelski et al (1952) to obtain latent extinction effects in a “replication” of Seward and Levy’s (1949)...     

Young children’s contingent interactions with a touchscreen influence their memory for spatial and narrative content

ABSTRACT

Young children have difficulty learning from two-dimensional (2D) sources (e.g., television). One reason for this may be that 2D media lacks the contingent feedback present in social interactions. Touchscreens can provide contingent, reciprocal responses in the absence of a social partner, and thus may have the potential to overcome the challenges of learning by viewing. We assessed 30- to 48-month-old children’s memory for eBook content and traced objects after interactive or observational touchscreen exposure. The degree of interactivity with the touchscreen varied by three conditions of (1) close-mapping in which the touchscreen input corresponded closely with the output, (2) far-mapping, and (3) watching a screen recording. Children who watched the screen recording did best on delayed object recognition for traced objects, whereas results for the eBook material revealed a condition by gender by age (months) interaction. Girls’ memory for eBook material improved with increasing age after interacting via near- or far-mapping. Results are discussed in terms of gender and age differences in executive functioning and the capacity of cognitive load, and the limitations of contingent interactions.