Pigeons encode absolute distance but relational direction from landmarks and walls

In recent studies, researchers have examined animals' use of absolute or relational distances in finding a hidden goal. When trained with an array of landmarks, most animals use the default strategy of searching at an absolute distance from 1 or more landmarks. In contrast, when trained in enclosures, animals often use the relationship among walls. In the present study, pigeons were trained to find the center of an array of landmarks or a set of short walls that did not block external cues. Expansion tests showed that both groups of pigeons primarily used an absolute distance strategy. However, on rotational tests, pigeons continued to search in the center of the array, suggesting that direction was learned in relation to array.     

Manic thinking: independent effects of thought speed and thought content on mood

This experiment found that the speed of thought affects mood. Thought speed was manipulated via participants' paced reading of statements designed to induce either an elated or a depressed mood. Participants not only experienced more positive mood in response to elation than in response to depression statements, but also experienced an independent increase in positive mood when they had been thinking fast rather than slow--for both elation and depression statements. This effect of thought speed extended beyond mood to other experiences often associated with mania (i.e., feelings of power, feelings of creativity, a heightened sense of energy, and inflated self-esteem or grandiosity).     

Taking the task seriously: reflections on measures of color acquisition

The experiments described in the lead articles by Kowalski and Zimiles and by O'Hanlon and Roberson examine factors that lead to color term acquisition. These experiments touch on the debate regarding the relative contributions of language and concepts in word learning. In this reflection, we examine how conclusions concerning the debate depend deeply on the particular task presented to children, and we propose an alternative approach to studying color term acquisition.     

Scope of attention, control of attention, and intelligence in children and adults

Recent experimentation has shown that cognitive aptitude measures are predicted by tests of the scope of an individual's attention or capacity in simple working memory tasks and also by the ability to control attention. However, these experiments do not indicate how separate or related the scope and control of attention are. An experiment with 52 children (10 to 11 years old) and 52 college students included measures of the scope and control of attention, as well as verbal and nonverbal aptitude measures. The children showed little evidence of using sophisticated attentional control, but the scope of attention predicted intelligence in that group. In adults, both the scope and control of attention varied among individuals and accounted for considerable individual variance in intelligence. About one third that variance was shared between scope an d control, and the rest was unique to one or the other.Scope and control of attention appear to be related but distinct contributors to intelligence.     

Modeling college women's perceptions of elite leadership positions with Social Cognitive Career Theory

The utility of Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994) for predicting college women's interests and goals for positions of elite leadership was examined with 156 undergraduate women at a public university. They completed measures of elite leadership self-efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, interests, and goals. Results supported SCCT as a theoretical framework for understanding internal factors that may contribute to women's elite leadership interests and goals. Self-efficacy and outcome expectations for elite leadership positions related positively to interests and goals for such positions, and self-efficacy and outcome expectations each contributed unique variance to the prediction of elite leadership interests. Outcome expectations partially mediated the relation between elite leadership self-efficacy and interests, interests partially mediated the relation between elite leadership outcome expectations and goals, and the combination of elite leadership interests and outcome expectations completely mediated the relation between self-efficacy for elite leadership positions and elite leadership goals.     

Novel labels support 10-month-olds’ attention to novel objects

What is the source of the mutual exclusivity bias whereby infants map novel labels onto novel objects? In an intermodal preferential looking task, we found that novel labels support 10-month-olds’ attention to a novel object over a familiar object. In contrast, familiar labels and a neutral phrase gradually reduced attention to a novel object. Markman (1989, 1990) argued that infants must recall the name of a familiar object to exclude it as the referent of a novel label. We argue that 10-month-olds’ attention is guided by the novelty of objects and labels rather than knowledge of the names for familiar objects. Mutual exclusivity, as a language-specific bias, might emerge from a more general constraint on attention and learning.     

Observing behavior and atypically restricted stimulus control

Restricted stimulus control refers to discrimination learning with atypical limitations in the range of controlling stimuli or stimulus features. In the study reported here, 4 normally capable individuals and 10 individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) performed two-sample delayed matching to sample. Sample-stimulus observing was recorded with an eye-tracking apparatus. High accuracy scores indicated stimulus control by both sample stimuli for the 4 nondisabled participants and 4 participants with ID, and eye tracking data showed reliable observing of all stimuli. Intermediate accuracy scores indicated restricted stimulus control for the remaining 6 participants. Their eye-tracking data showed that errors were related to failures to observe sample stimuli and relatively brief observing durations. Five of these participants were then given interventions designed to improve observing behavior. For 4 participants, the interventions resulted initially in elimination of observing failures, increased observing durations, and increased accuracy. For 2 of these participants, contingencies sufficient to maintain adequate observing were not always sufficient to maintain high accuracy; subsequent procedure modifications restored it, however. For the 5th participant, initial improvements in observing were not accompanied by improved accuracy, an apparent instance of observing without attending; accuracy improved only after an additional intervention that imposed contingencies on observing behavior. Thus, interventions that control observing behavior seem necessary but may not always be sufficient for the remediation of restricted stimulus control.     

Time-dependent transformations of memory representations differ along the long axis of the hippocampus

Research has shown that sleep is beneficial for the long-term retention of memories. According to theories of memory consolidation, memories are gradually reorganized, becoming supported by widespread, distributed cortical networks, particularly during postencoding periods of sleep. However, the effects of sleep on the organization of memories in the hippocampus itself remains less clear. In a 3-d study, participants encoded separate lists of word–image pairs differing in their opportunity for sleep-dependent consolidation. Pairs were initially studied either before or after an overnight sleep period, and were then restudied in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan session. We used multivariate pattern similarity analyses to examine fine-grained effects of consolidation on memory representations in the hippocampus. We provide evidence for a dissociation along the long axis of the hippocampus that emerges with consolidation, such that representational patterns for object–word memories initially formed prior to sleep become differentiated in anterior hippocampus and more similar, or overlapping, in posterior hippocampus. Differentiation in anterior hippocampal representations correlated with subsequent behavioral performance. Furthermore, representational overlap in posterior hippocampus correlated with the duration of intervening slow wave sleep. Together, these results demonstrate that sleep-dependent consolidation promotes the reorganization of memory traces along the long axis of the hippocampus.

The hippocampus has long been considered critical for encoding new memories; however, the effects of consolidation on hippocampal memory traces has remained an area of active research. Memories are thought to be stabilized for the long term as they become distributed across neocortical networks (Buzsáki 1989; Alvarez and Squire 1994; McClelland et al. 1995), a process supported by mechanisms during sleep (Diekelmann and Born 2010; Rasch and Born 2013). Whereas much research has been devoted to understanding the hippocampal contributions to the long-term retention of memories, open questions remain in considering how sleep-dependent consolidation affects the organization of hippocampal traces.The hippocampus has previously been shown to be critical for binding disparate elements of an experience together (Cohen and Eichenbaum 1993; Davachi 2006). Theories suggest that the hippocampus quickly encodes new experiences, while the cortex, with a slower learning rate, gradually comes to represent the central features from this hippocampal trace, resulting in abstracted memories that can be integrated into long-term cortical stores (McClelland et al. 1995). Prior research has demonstrated evidence for a coordinated hippocampal–cortical dialogue during sleep (Andrade et al. 2011; Bergmann et al. 2012; Ngo et al. 2020) as well as enhanced hippocampal–cortical functional connectivity after learning, facilitating the retention of memories (Tambini et al. 2010; Tompary et al. 2015; Murty et al. 2017; Cowan et al. 2021). Reports suggest consolidation results in more integrated cortical memory traces in the cortex (Richards et al. 2014; Tompary and Davachi 2017; Cowan et al. 2020); however, it remains an open question whether the active consolidation processes that support memory reorganization across hippocampal–cortical networks also transform hippocampal memory traces.Research on the fate of the hippocampal trace with consolidation has often focused on questions about the permanence of memories in the hippocampus. Theories of systems consolidation have classically debated whether the hippocampal trace is time-limited (Alvarez and Squire 1994), or, rather, whether the hippocampus continues to represent memories in perpetuity (Nadel and Moscovitch 1997; Winocur and Moscovitch 2011; Moscovitch et al. 2016; Sekeres et al. 2018a). Another theory posits that while the original hippocampal trace is transient, during retrieval the hippocampus reconstructs details of an experience from cortical traces (Barry and Maguire 2019). Much research in this vein has focused on investigating changes in hippocampal blood-oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) univariate activation with time (Bosshardt et al. 2005a,b; Takashima et al. 2006, 2009; Gais et al. 2007; Sterpenich et al. 2007, 2009; Yamashita et al. 2009; Milton et al. 2011; Watanabe et al. 2012; Ritchey et al. 2015; Baran et al. 2016; Dandolo and Schwabe 2018) and the effects of hippocampal lesions in animals and humans (Winocur et al. 2001; Frankland and Bontempi 2005; Winocur and Moscovitch 2011; Moscovitch et al. 2016) with mixed results. Interestingly, pinpointing these effects along the long axis of the hippocampus has also proven unclear. Some reports have found that only the anterior hippocampus exhibits time-dependent changes in retrieval-related univariate activation, with evidence of decreases with delay (Takashima et al. 2006; Milton et al. 2011; Dandolo and Schwabe 2018), but also evidence of greater activation for more remote, compared with recent, memories (Bosshardt et al. 2005a,b). At the same time, other studies have found decreases in univariate activation only in the posterior hippocampus (Bosshardt et al. 2005b; Takashima et al. 2009; Yamashita et al. 2009; Milton et al. 2011; Watanabe et al. 2012; Ritchey et al. 2015; Sekeres et al. 2018b).Because of these conflicting findings, instead of asking just about dependence or overall changes in activation in the hippocampus, theories and empirical research have instead increasingly considered the organization of memory representations in the hippocampus (Robin and Moscovitch 2017; Sekeres et al. 2018a). Broadly, using representational similarity analyses, several studies have shown that hippocampal memory representations tend to become differentiated over learning, particularly for memories with overlapping content (LaRocque et al. 2013; Schlichting et al. 2015; Chanales et al. 2017; Brunec et al. 2020). Furthermore, it has been suggested that information is represented at different scales or “granularity” along the long axis of the hippocampus, in line with place field size differences (Kjelstrup et al. 2008; Komorowski et al. 2013), with anterior hippocampus representing more similar, coarse-grained, or gist-like information, while the posterior hippocampus represents fine-grained, detail-oriented representations (Evensmoen et al. 2013; Poppenk et al. 2013; Robin and Moscovitch 2017; Brunec et al. 2018, 2020). However, limited work has investigated whether this representational organization is altered with consolidation. Reports have shown that memory representations sharing overlapping content become more similar over a delay (Tompary and Davachi 2017; Audrain and McAndrews 2020), yet other work has found that hippocampal representations were not modulated by time (Ritchey et al. 2015; Ezzyat et al. 2018). Intriguingly, reports indicating greater differentiation in memories in anterior compared with posterior hippocampus with consolidation (Tompary and Davachi 2017; Dandolo and Schwabe 2018; Ezzyat et al. 2018) raise the possibility that the representational granularity along the anteroposterior axis may be transformed with consolidation. Thus, more work is needed to understand how consolidation influences the representational structure of memories in the hippocampus. In particular, despite much research connecting sleep to consolidation (Diekelmann and Born 2010; Rasch and Born 2013), it remains unknown whether sleep-dependent processes facilitate such delay-dependent transformations to the hippocampus.Active processes in the sleeping brain seem to be optimized for systems consolidation. Currently, the best mechanistic evidence for sleep-dependent consolidation comes from studies on hippocampal replay showing the repeated reactivation of encoding-related patterns of hippocampal activity (Buzsáki 1989; Wilson and McNaughton 1994; Girardeau and Zugaro 2011), which seems to be coordinated with replay in areas of the cortex (Ji and Wilson 2007; Peyrache et al. 2009; Wierzynski et al. 2009). It is thought that the coupling between oscillations during non-REM sleep stages (particularly slow wave sleep [SWS])—including sharp wave ripples that support replay, thalamocortical spindles, and slow oscillations—facilitates the hippocampal–cortical dialogue and information transfer to the cortex (Buzsáki 1996; Sirota et al. 2003; Steriade 2006; Clemens et al. 2011; Mölle and Born 2011; Staresina et al. 2015). Indeed, our previously published work from the present study provided supporting evidence that the density of thalamocortical sleep spindles (11–16 Hz) during overnight sleep is related to enhanced hippocampal–cortical functional connectivity measures, and increased similarity, or greater representational overlap, among memories in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) (Cowan et al. 2020). Yet, while some prior work has shown that features of sleep, including spindle density and the duration of non-REM SWS, are related to decreased retrieval-related hippocampal activation for memoranda learned prior to sleep (Takashima et al. 2006; Baran et al. 2016; Hennies et al. 2016), it remains unclear how the reactivation of hippocampal traces during replay may impact the way memories are organized along the long axis of the hippocampus.To examine the effects of sleep-dependent consolidation on the neural representation of memories in the hippocampus, we designed a within-participant 3-d study using overnight polysomnography (PSG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and behavioral measures of memory (Fig. 1). In this study, aspects of which have been previously published (Cowan et al. 2020), participants first studied a list of word–image pairs before sleeping overnight (Sleep List), during which PSG was recorded. Upon waking in the morning, participants studied a new list of pairs (Morning List). The word–image pairs from these two lists were then restudied while undergoing an fMRI scan, intermixed with a third, novel list of pairs (Single Study List). Associative memory was tested immediately after the scan and again 24 h later. We compared measures of multivariate pattern similarity and univariate BOLD signal for the lists learned prior to, or after, sleep to probe how modulating the opportunity for sleep-dependent consolidation impacts the way memories are organized across the long axis of the hippocampus. Furthermore, our design allowed us to examine how features of overnight sleep are related to the representational organization of memories learned prior to the sleep period, as well as the behavioral benefit of changes to the organization of these memories. Thus, our study provides a novel examination of the effects of sleep-dependent consolidation on the representation of memories along the long axis of the hippocampus.Open in a separate windowFigure 1.Study design. For all encoding and restudy sessions, participants were asked to form an association between a word and an image. Participants first encoded the Sleep List (blue) before sleeping overnight while polysomnography was recorded. The next morning (day 2), participants encoded a second set of novel word–image pairs (Morning List). After a short delay (∼2 h), participants restudied these two sets of pairs, intermixed with novel pairs (Single Study List) in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. Source memory was tested immediately after the scan and after a 24-h delay (day 3).     

Reflecting on imagery: A clinical perspective and overview of the special issue of Memory on mental imagery and memory in psychopathology

The authors provide an overview of the papers in the special issue of Memory on mental imagery and memory in psychopathology. The papers address emotional, intrusive mental imagery across a range of psychological disorders including post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), agoraphobia, body dysmorphic disorder, mood disorders, and psychosis. They include work on information processing issues including modelling cravings, conditioning, and aversions, as well as imagery qualities such as vividness and emotionality. The overview aims to place the articles in a broader context and draw out some exciting implications of this novel work. It provides a clinical context to the recent growth in this area from a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) perspective. We begin with PTSD, and consider links to imagery in other disorders. The clinical implications stemming from this empirical work and from autobiographical memory theory are discussed. These include consideration of a variety of techniques for eliminating troublesome imagery, and creating healthy, realistic alternatives.