The relation between verbal and visuospatial memory and autobiographical memory

The basic-systems approach (Rubin, 2005, 2006) states that autobiographical memory is supported by other cognitive systems and argues that autobiographical memories are constructed from interactions between cognitive systems, such as language, vision and emotion. Although deficiencies in one or more of the basic systems influence the properties of autobiographical memories, little is known about how these cognitive abilities and autobiographical memory are related. To assert whether participants with stronger cognitive abilities also perform better on autobiographical memory tests, participants who completed verbal and visuospatial memory tests also recorded one personal event, which they recalled after a certain interval. Participants who performed well on the verbal memory tests also had better retention for the personal event, providing support for the basic-systems approach to autobiographical memory and preliminary support for the view that people have more memories from adolescence and early adulthood because the memory system works optimally in these lifetime periods.     

Re-examining the role of context in implicit sequence learning

Implicit sequence learning typically develops gradually, is often expressed quite rigidly, and is heavily reliant on contextual features. Recently we reported results pointing to the role of context-specific processes in the acquisition and expression of implicit sequence knowledge (D’Angelo, Milliken, Jiménez, & Lupiáñez, 2013). Here we examined further the role of context in learning of first-order conditional sequences, and whether context also plays a role in learning second-order conditional structures. Across five experiments we show that the role of context in first-order conditional sequences may not be as clear as we had previously reported, while at the same time we find evidence for the role of context in learning second-order conditional sequences. Together the results suggest that temporal context may be sufficient to learn complementary first-order conditional sequences, but that additional contextual information is necessary to concurrently learn higher-order sequential structures.     

Associative recognition processes are modulated by the semantic unitizability of memoranda

Although memory of episodic associations is generally considered to be recollective in nature, it has been suggested that when stimuli are experienced as a unit, familiarity processes might contribute to their subsequent associative recognition. To investigate the effect of semantic relatedness during episodic encoding on the processes of retrieval of associative information, we had participants interactively encode pairs of object pictures, vertically arranged so as to suggest a functional or configural relationship between them. Half the pairs were independently judged to be of related objects (e.g., a lamp over a table) and half of unrelated objects (e.g., a key-ring over an apple). At test, participants discriminated between intact, recombined, and new pairs while event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. In an early ERP marker of retrieval success generally associated with familiarity processes, differences related to associative memory only emerged for related pairs, while differences associated with item memory emerged for both related and unrelated pairs. In contrast, in a later ERP effect associated with recollection, differences related to associative memory emerged for both related and unrelated pairs. These findings may indicate that retrieval of episodic associations formed between two semantically related visual stimuli can be supported by familiarity-related processes.     

Children's reasoning about the temporal order of past and future events

Four- and five-year-olds completed two sets of tasks that involved reasoning about the temporal order in which events had occurred in the past or were to occur in the future. Four-year-olds succeeded on the tasks that involved reasoning about the order of past events but not those that involved reasoning about the order of future events, whereas 5-year-olds passed both types of tasks. Individual children who failed the past-event tasks were not particularly likely to fail the more difficult future-event tasks. However, children's performance on the reasoning tasks was predictive of their performance on a task assessing their comprehension of the terms “before” and “after.” Our results suggest that there may be a developmental change over this age range in the ability to flexibly represent and reason about the before-and-after relationships between events.     

Effects of saccadic bilateral eye movements on memory in children and adults: an exploratory study

The effects of saccadic bilateral (horizontal) eye movements on true and false memory in adults and children were investigated. Both adults and children encoded lists of associated words in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm followed by a test of recognition memory. Just prior to retrieval, participants were asked to engage in 30s of bilateral vs. vertical vs. no eye movements. For studied information, the results for adults replicated previous work; bilateral eye movements were demonstrated to increase the accuracy of memory by increasing the hit rate and reducing the false alarm rate for related and unrelated recognition test lures. The results for children also indicated an improvement in memory accuracy, and like adults, was due to both an increase in the hit rate and a reduction in the false alarm rate. In spite of these similarities, the effects of bilateral eye movements differed between adults and children for critical unstudied words; i.e., those associated with the theme of the list. Only in adults did, bilateral eye movements reduce associative false memories; children did not show a reduction in false memory for critical associates. This produced a dissociation between the effects of eye movements on associative false memory as a function of age. The results are discussed from a developmental perspective in terms of potential mechanisms underlying true and false memory.