The contribution of familiarity to within- and between-domain associative recognition memory: Use of a modified remember/know procedure

The purpose of the present study was to determine the extent to which familiarity can support associative recognition memory as a function of whether the associations are within- or between-domain. Standard recognition and familiarity only performance were compared in different participants, using a new adaptation of the remember/know procedure. The results indicated that within-domain (face–face) associative recognition was mainly supported by familiarity. In contrast, familiarity provided relatively poor support to between-domain (face–name) associative recognition for which optimal performance required a major recollection contribution. These findings suggest that familiarity can support associative recognition memory, particularly for within-domain associations, and contrast with the widely held view that associative recognition depends largely on recollection.     

The importance of feature distribution and correlation for simulating 3 to 4-month-old infants' visual categorization processes

Mareschal, French, and Quinn (2000) and Mareschal, Quinn, and French (2002) have proposed a connectionist model of visual categorization in 3- to 4-month-old infants that simulates and predicts previously unexplained behavioural effects such as the asymmetric categorization effect (French, Mareschal, Mermillod, & Quinn, 2004). In the current paper, we show that the model's ability to simulate the asymmetry depends on the correlational structure of the stimuli. These results are important given that adults (Anderson & Fincham, 1996) as well as infants (Younger & Cohen, 1986) are able to rely on correlation information to perform visual categorization. At a behavioural level, the current paper suggests that pure bottom-up processes, based on the correlational structure of the categories, could explain the disappearance of the asymmetry in older 10-month-old infants (Furrer & Younger, 2005). Moreover, our results also raise new challenges for visual categorization models that attempt to simulate the shift from asymmetric categorization in 3- to 4-month-old to symmetric categorization in 10-month-old infants (Shultz & Cohen, 2004; Westermann & Mareschal, 2004, 2012).     

The effects of happy and angry expressions on identity and expression memory for unfamiliar faces

We investigated the influence of happy and angry expressions on memory for new faces. Participants were presented with happy and angry faces in an intentional or incidental learning condition and were later asked to recognise the same faces displaying a neutral expression. They also had to remember what the initial expressions of the faces had been. Remember/know/guess judgements were made both for identity and expression memory. Results showed that faces were better recognised when presented with a happy rather than an angry expression, but only when learning was intentional. This was mainly due to an increase of the "remember" responses for happy faces when encoding was intentional rather than incidental. In contrast, memory for emotional expressions was not different for happy and angry faces whatever the encoding conditions. We interpret these findings according to the social meaning of emotional expressions for the self.     

Phenomenal characteristics associated with projecting oneself back into the past and forward into the future: influence of valence and temporal distance

As humans, we frequently engage in mental time travel, reliving past experiences and imagining possible future events. This study examined whether similar factors affect the subjective experience associated with remembering the past and imagining the future. Participants mentally "re-experienced" or "pre-experienced" positive and negative events that differed in their temporal distance from the present (close versus distant), and then rated the phenomenal characteristics (i.e., sensorial, contextual, and emotional details) associated with their representations. For both past and future, representations of positive events were associated with a greater feeling of re-experiencing (or pre-experiencing) than representations of negative events. In addition, representations of temporally close events (both past and future) contained more sensorial and contextual details, and generated a stronger feeling of re-experiencing (or pre-experiencing) than representations of temporally distant events. It is suggested that the way we both remember our past and imagine our future is constrained by our current goals.     

Individual differences in the phenomenology of mental time travel: The effect of vivid visual imagery and emotion regulation strategies

It has been claimed that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are intimately related. We sought support for this proposition by examining whether individual differences in dimensions that have been shown to affect memory for past events similarly influence the experience of projecting oneself into the future. We found that individuals with a higher capacity for visual imagery experienced more visual and other sensory details both when remembering past events and when imagining future events. In addition, individuals who habitually use suppression to regulate their emotions experienced fewer sensory, contextual, and emotional details when representing both past and future events, while the use of reappraisal had no effect on either kind of events. These findings are consistent with the view that mental time travel into the past and into the future relies on similar mechanisms.     

The neural correlates of implicit and explicit sequence learning: Interacting networks revealed by the process dissociation procedure

In two H2(15)O PET scan experiments, we investigated the cerebral correlates of explicit and implicit knowledge in a serial reaction time (SRT) task. To do so, we used a novel application of the Process Dissociation Procedure, a behavioral paradigm that makes it possible to separately assess conscious and unconscious contributions to performance during a subsequent sequence generation task. To manipulate the extent to which the repeating sequential pattern was learned explicitly, we varied the pace of the choice reaction time task-a variable that is known to have differential effects on the extent to which sensitivity to sequence structure involves implicit or explicit knowledge. Results showed that activity in the striatum subtends the implicit component of performance during recollection of a learned sequence, whereas the anterior cingulate/mesial prefrontal cortex (ACC/MPFC) supports the explicit component. Most importantly, we found that the ACC/MPFC exerts control on the activity of the striatum during retrieval of the sequence after explicit learning, whereas the activity of these regions is uncoupled when learning had been essentially implicit. These data suggest that implicit learning processes can be successfully controlled by conscious knowledge when learning is essentially explicit. They also supply further evidence for a partial dissociation between the neural substrates supporting conscious and nonconscious components of performance during recollection of a learned sequence.     

Influence of emotion on memory for temporal information

Contextual information, such as color and spatial location, has been found to be better remembered for emotional than for neutral items. The current study examined whether the influence of emotion extends to memory for another fundamental feature of episodic memory: temporal information. Results from a list-discrimination paradigm showed that (a) item memory was enhanced for both negative and positive pictures compared with neutral ones and was better for negative than for positive pictures and (b) temporal information was better remembered for negative than for positive and neutral pictures, whereas positive and neutral pictures did not differ from each other. These findings are discussed in relation to the processes involved in memory for temporal information.     

Memory for temporal context: effects of ageing, encoding instructions, and retrieval strategies

Young and older adults were compared on a list discrimination task. In Experiment 1, performance declined with ageing after incidental and intentional encoding of the temporal context. Moreover, there was no benefit for intentional encoding in either group. In Experiment 2, each list was associated with a different encoding context. There were age differences in performance when participants tried to retrieve the encoding context of the items as a cue for their list of occurrence, but not when participants evaluated temporal distance from the strength of the memory trace. This suggests that the age-related decrease in list discrimination could be at least partly due to a difficulty in inferring strategically the temporal context of the items from information encoded in the same time.     

Modulation of brain activity during phonological familiarization

We measured brain activity in 12 adults for the repetition of auditorily presented words and nonwords, before and after repeated exposure to their phonological form. The nonword phoneme combinations were either of high (HF) or low (LF) phonotactic frequency. After familiarization, we observed, for both word and nonword conditions, decreased activation in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus, in the bilateral temporal pole and middle temporal gyri. At the same time, interaction analysis showed that the magnitude of decrease of activity in bilateral posterior temporal lobe was significantly smaller for LF nonwords, relative to words and HF nonwords. Decrease of activity in this area also correlated with the size of behavioral familiarization effects for LF nonwords. The results show that the posterior superior temporal gyrus plays a fundamental role during phonological learning. Its relationship to sublexical and lexical phonological processing as well as to phonological short-term memory is discussed.     

The coarse-to-fine hypothesis revisited: evidence from neuro-computational modeling

The human perceptual system seems to be driven by a coarse-to-fine integration of visual information. Different results have shown a faster integration of low-spatial frequency compared with high-spatial frequency (HSF) information, starting at early retinal processes. The difference in spatial scale decomposition remains throughout the lateral geniculate nucleus (Hubel & Wiesel, 1977) and V1 (Tootell, Silverman, & De Valois, 1981). During the last decade, a debate has emerged concerning the origin of the coarse-to-fine integration. Is it a constant, perceptually driven integration (Parker et al., 1992 and Parker et al., 1996)? Instead, the flexible use hypothesis suggests that different spatial frequency channels could be enhanced depending on the requirement of the task for high-level cognitive processes like categorization (Oliva and Schyns, 1997 and Schyns and Oliva, 1999). In two connectionist simulations, we have shown that global categorization performance could actually be better performed with HSF information when the amount of information is normalized across the different spatial frequency channels. Those results suggest that high-level requirement alone could not explain the coarse-to-fine bias toward LSF information. A hypothesis is proposed concerning the possible implication of the amount of data provided by different spatial frequency channel that might provide the perceptual bias toward LSF information.