Impaired semantic memory during acute transient global amnesia

As a clinical model of hippocampal dysfunction, transient global amnesia (TGA) causes reversible memory disturbance. While episodic memory deficits in TGA patients have been extensively described, data regarding semantic memory involvement are sparse and contradictory. We report impaired semantic fluency performance in 16 patients with hippocampal lesions on MRI during acute TGA compared to their performance one day later and to that of 20 healthy subjects. Our findings support the involvement of the hippocampus in semantic retrieval.     

Dreaming the other's past: Why remembering may still be relevant to psychoanalytic therapy,at least in some traditions

Against the background of a reconstruction of the reasons for the vanishing role of remembering in the history of psychoanalysis, Botella's (2014, Int J Psychoanal, 95 ) arguments regarding the therapeutic significance of reconstruction and remembering and of the therapist's role are discussed. The difference between intellectual reconstruction and actual emotional remembering are underlined, the term regredience is compared to competing concepts such as equally suspended attention, countertransference and reverie. It is argued that to conceptualize the use of countertransferential associations for reconstructing past traumatic events is difficult with a monadic conception of the unconscious and problematic both in terms of truth claims and in terms of achieving a shared creative atmosphere in which therapist and patient participate alike. It is concluded that historical truth may be important for traumatic experiences, and that biographical reconstruction and change in the subjective life story help to make sense of neurotic patterns and integrate diachronic identity.     

The mark of adaptive memory in healthy and cognitively impaired older adults and elderly

The survival processing paradigm has recently drawn attention to the functional aspects of memory functioning. The survival effect, characterized by better memory performance when information is processed in a survival context, as compared with a variety of controls, is now well established in healthy populations. The main goal of this study was to test this paradigm in a group of cognitively impaired older adults and elderly; their data were compared to the data obtained in a group of healthy older adults and elderly. Seventeen cognitively impaired and 17 healthy participants performed a typical survival task using a blocked within‐subject design procedure and free recall as the memory test. The healthy older adults and elderly performed better on this memory task as well as on other tests included in a neuropsychological evaluation protocol. Importantly, both groups benefited from survival processing. These results provide further support for the power of survival processing, extending this phenomenon to cognitively impaired aging participants. The data also suggest that the survival effect is not simply a form of deep processing. Potential applied considerations are presented.     

Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Misinformation Effects and Hindsight Bias

The present study examined individual differences in susceptibility to two similar forms of memory distortion: the misinformation effect and hindsight bias. The misinformation effect occurs when individuals witness an event, are provided with misinformation, and recall the original event as containing elements of the misinformation. Hindsight bias occurs when individuals make judgments, are provided with feedback, and recall their original judgments as being more similar to the feedback than they actually were. Seventy-five participants completed a misinformation task, a hindsight bias task, and several individual difference measures related to memory distortions. Working memory capacity was negatively correlated with the misinformation effect and hindsight bias, and the misinformation effect and hindsight bias were negatively correlated with one another. Although the misinformation effect and hindsight bias are measured with similar designs, and both are predicted by working memory capacity, the negative correlation between them suggests these phenomena result from somewhat different processes.     

Belief-based action prediction in preverbal infants

Successful mindreading entails both the ability to think about what others know or believe, and to use this knowledge to generate predictions about how mental states will influence behavior. While previous studies have demonstrated that young infants are sensitive to others’ mental states, there continues to be much debate concerning how to characterize early theory of mind abilities. In the current study, we asked whether 6-month-old infants appreciate the causal role that beliefs play in action. Specifically, we tested whether infants generate action predictions that are appropriate given an agent’s current belief. We exploited a novel, neural indication of action prediction: motor cortex activation as measured by sensorimotor alpha suppression, to ask whether infants would generate differential predictions depending on an agent’s belief. After first verifying our paradigm and measure with a group of adult participants, we found that when an agent had a false belief that a ball was in the box, motor activity indicated that infants predicted she would reach for the box, but when the agent had a false belief that a ball was not in the box, infants did not predict that she would act. In both cases, infants based their predictions on what the agent, rather than the infant, believed to be the case, suggesting that by 6 months of age, infants can exploit their sensitivity to other minds for action prediction.     

Low working memory capacity is only spuriously related to poor reading comprehension

Accounts of comprehension failure, whether in the case of readers with poor skill or when syntactic complexity is high, have overwhelmingly implicated working memory capacity as the key causal factor. However, extant research suggests that this position is not well supported by evidence on the span of active memory during online sentence processing, nor is it well motivated by models that make explicit claims about the memory mechanisms that support language processing. The current study suggests that sensitivity to interference from similar items in memory may provide a better explanation of comprehension failure. Through administration of a comprehensive skill battery, we found that the previously observed association of working memory with comprehension is likely due to the collinearity of working memory with many other reading-related skills, especially IQ. In analyses which removed variance shared with IQ, we found that receptive vocabulary knowledge was the only significant predictor of comprehension performance in our task out of a battery of 24 skill measures. In addition, receptive vocabulary and non-verbal memory for serial order—but not simple verbal memory or working memory—were the only predictors of reading times in the region where interference had its primary affect. We interpret these results in light of a model that emphasizes retrieval interference and the quality of lexical representations as key determinants of successful comprehension.     

What factors underlie children’s susceptibility to semantic and phonological false memories? Investigating the roles of language skills and auditory short-term memory

Two experiments investigated the cognitive skills that underlie children’s susceptibility to semantic and phonological false memories in the Deese/Roediger–McDermott procedure ( and ). In Experiment 1, performance on the Verbal Similarities subtest of the British Ability Scales (BAS) II (Elliott, Smith, & McCulloch, 1997) predicted correct and false recall of semantic lures. In Experiment 2, performance on the Yopp–Singer Test of Phonemic Segmentation (Yopp, 1988) did not predict correct recall, but inversely predicted the false recall of phonological lures. Auditory short-term memory was a negative predictor of false recall in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2. The findings are discussed in terms of the formation of gist and verbatim traces as proposed by fuzzy trace theory (Reyna & Brainerd, 1998) and the increasing automaticity of associations as proposed by associative activation theory (Howe, Wimmer, Gagnon, & Plumpton, 2009).     

Working memory retrieval differences between medial temporal lobe epilepsy patients and controls: A three memory layer approach

Multi-store models of working memory (WM) have given way to more dynamic approaches that conceive WM as an activated subset of long-term memory (LTM). The resulting framework considers that memory representations are governed by a hierarchy of accessibility. The activated part of LTM holds representations in a heightened state of activation, some of which can reach a state of immediate accessibility according to task demands. Recent neuroimaging studies have studied the neural basis of retrieval information with different states of accessibility. It was found that the medial temporal lobe (MTL) was involved in retrieving information within immediate access store and outside this privileged zone. In the current study we further explored the contribution of MTL to WM retrieval by analyzing the consequences of MTL damage to this process considering the state of accessibility of memory representations. The performance of a group of epilepsy patients with left hippocampal sclerosis in a 12-item recognition task was compared with that of a healthy control group. We adopted an embedded model of WM that distinguishes three components: the activated LTM, the region of direct access, and a single-item focus of attention. Groups did not differ when retrieving information from single-item focus, but patients were less accurate retrieving information outside focal attention, either items from LTM or items expected to be in the WM range. Analyses focused on items held in the direct access buffer showed that consequences of MTL damage were modulated by the level of accessibility of memory representations, producing a reduced capacity.     

Observed Variability and Values Matter: Toward a Better Understanding of Information Search and Decisions from Experience

The search for different options before making a consequential choice is a central aspect of many important decisions, such as mate selection or purchasing a house. Despite its importance, surprisingly little is known about how search and choice are affected by the observed and objective properties of the decision problem. Here, we analyze the effects of two key properties in a binary choice task: the options' observed and objective values, and the variability of payoffs. First, in a large public data set of a binary choice task, we investigate how the observed value and variability relate to decision‐makers' efforts and preferences during search. Furthermore, we test how these properties influence the chance of correctly identifying the objectively maximizing option, and how they affect choice. Second, we designed a novel experiment to systematically analyze the role of the objective difference between the options. We find that a larger objective difference between options increases the chance for correctly identifying the maximizing option, but it does not affect behavior during search and choice. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

视觉工作记忆负载对偏差干扰调控的ERP研究

采用事件相关电位技术（ERPs）,对听视跨通道不同工作记忆负载下偏差干扰效应的加工机制进行研究。当视觉线索50%时,比较有无工作记忆负载条件下偏差干扰效应,分析偏差刺激与标准刺激诱发的差异波,结果发现：（1）存在工作记忆负载和偏差干扰效应;（2）有无工作记忆负载下差异波均出现明显的N1/MMN成分、NP3和RON成分;（3）差异波中N1/MMN成分的平均波幅和潜伏期均没有差异,NP3成分的平均波幅下降;RON成分在平均波幅上没有差异,潜伏期上有工作记忆负载下显著小于无工作记忆负载。研究表明视觉工作记忆负载对偏差干扰调控过程的神经机制并不会因为无关信息与相关信息间冲突竞争增强而改变。