Alcohol and remembering a hypothetical sexual assault: Can people who were under the influence of alcohol during the event provide accurate testimony?

We examined the influence of alcohol on remembering an interactive hypothetical sexual assault scenario in the laboratory using a balanced placebo design. Female participants completed a memory test 24 hours and 4 months later. Participants reported less information (i.e., responded “don't know” more often to questions) if they were under the influence of alcohol during scenario encoding. The accuracy of the information intoxicated participants reported did not differ compared to sober participants, however, suggesting intoxicated participants were effectively monitoring the accuracy of their memory at test. Additionally, peripheral details were remembered less accurately than central details, regardless of the intoxication level; and memory accuracy for peripheral details decreased by a larger amount compared to central details across the retention interval. Finally, participants were more accurate if they were told they were drinking alcohol rather than a placebo. We discuss theoretical implications for alcohol myopia and memory regulation, together with applied implications for interviewing intoxicated witnesses.     

Is retrieval the key? Metamemory judgment and testing as learning strategies

Re-reading is the most common learning strategy, albeit not a very efficient one. Testing is highly efficient, but not perceived by students as a learning strategy. Prospective judgment-of-learning (JOL) reflect the learner's impression of subsequently being able to retrieve the ongoing learning in a cued-recall task. Estimating JOL involves attempting to retrieve the information, as in testing. The few studies that have explored the potential mnemonic benefit of JOL have yielded contradictory results. Our aim was to compare JOL and testing with re-study and to examine the impact of these strategies according to the relative difficulty of the material (cue-target association strength) in two experiments. After a first encoding phase, participants re-studied, provided JOL, or took a test. Forty-eight hours later, they participated in a final cued-recall test, during which their confidence level judgments were collected. The main result was that delayed JOL behaved in the same way as testing, and both yielded better performances than re-study when material was of moderate difficulty. The easy or very difficult material revealed no differences between these strategies. JOL is proposed as an alternative to testing when faced with difficult material.     

More to it than meets the eye: how eye movements can elucidate the development of episodic memory

The ability to recognise past events along with the contexts in which they occurred is a hallmark of episodic memory, a critical capacity. Eye movements have been shown to track veridical memory for the associations between events and their contexts (relational binding). Such eye-movement effects emerge several seconds before, or in the absence of, explicit response, and are linked to the integrity and function of the hippocampus. Drawing from research from infancy through late childhood, and by comparing to investigations from typical adults, patient populations, and animal models, it seems increasingly clear that eye movements reflect item–item, item–temporal, and item–spatial associations in developmental populations. We analyse this line of work, identify missing pieces in the literature and outline future avenues of research, in order to help elucidate the development of episodic memory.     

Proactive interference and concurrent inhibitory processes do not differentially affect item and associative recognition: Implication for the age-related associative memory deficit

Previous studies have suggested an associative deficit hypothesis [Naveh-Benjamin, M. (2000 Naveh-Benjamin, M., &; Guez, J. (2000). The effects of divided attention on encoding and retrieval processes: Assessment of attentional costs and a componential analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26(6), 1461–1482.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Adult age differences in memory performance: Tests of an associative deficit hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1170–1187] to explain age-related episodic memory declines. The hypothesis attributes part of the deficient episodic memory performance in older adults to a difficulty in creating and retrieving cohesive episodes. In this article, we further evaluate this hypothesis by testing two alternative processes that potentially mediate associative memory deficits in older adults. Four experiments are presented that assess whether failure of inhibitory processes (proactive interference in Experiments 1 and 2), and concurrent inhibition (in Experiments 3 and 4) are mediating factors in age-related associative deficits. The results suggest that creating conditions that require the operation of inhibitory processes, or that interfere with such processes, cannot simulate associative memory deficit in older adults. Instead, such results support the idea that associative memory deficits reflect a unique binding failure in older adults. This failure seems to be independent of other cognitive processes, including inhibitory and other resource-demanding processes.     

Revisiting the looking at nothing phenomenon: Visual and semantic biases in memory search

When visual stimuli remain present during search, people spend more time fixating objects that are semantically or visually related to the target instruction than looking at unrelated objects. Are these semantic and visual biases also observable when participants search within memory? We removed the visual display prior to search while continuously measuring eye movements towards locations previously occupied by objects. The target absent trials contained objects that were either visually or semantically related to the target instruction. When the overall mean proportion of fixation time was considered, we found biases towards the location previously occupied by the target, but failed to find biases towards visually or semantically related objects. However, in two experiments the pattern of biases towards the target over time provided a reliable predictor for biases towards the visually and semantically related objects. We therefore conclude that visual and semantic representations alone can guide eye movements in memory search, but that orienting biases are weak when the stimuli are no longer present.     

I owe you: age-related similarities and differences in associative memory for gains and losses

Older adults often experience associative memory impairments but can sometimes remember important information. The current experiments investigate potential age-related similarities and differences associate memory for gains and losses. Younger and older participants were presented with faces and associated dollar amounts, which indicated how much money the person “owed” the participant, and were later given a cued recall test for the dollar amount. Experiment 1 examined face-dollar amount pairs while Experiment 2 included negative dollar amounts to examine both gains and losses. While younger adults recalled more information relative to older adults, both groups were more accurate in recalling the correct value associated with high-value faces compared to lower-value faces and remembered gist-information about the values. However, negative values (losses) did not have a strong impact on recall among older adults versus younger adults, illustrating important associative memory differences between younger and older adults.     

Repetition blindness and homophone blindness in young and older adults

We tested age effects on repetition blindness (RB), defined as the reduced probability of reporting a target word following presentation of the same word in a rapidly presented list. We also tested age effects on homophone blindness (HB), in which the first word is a homophone of the target word rather than a repeated word. Thirty young and 28 older adults viewed rapidly presented lists of words containing repeated, homophone, or unrepeated word pairs and reported all of the words immediately after each list. Older adults exhibited a greater degree of RB and HB than young adults using a conditional scoring method that provides certainty that blindness has occurred. The existence of RB and HB for both age groups, and increased blindness for older compared to young adults, supports predictions of a binding theory that has successfully accounted for a wide range of phenomena in cognitive aging.     

Putting action memory to the test: testing affects subsequent restudy but not long-term forgetting of action events

Testing memory typically enhances subsequent re-encoding of information (“indirect” testing effect) and, as compared to restudy, it also benefits later long-term retention (“direct” testing effect). We investigated the effect of testing on subsequent restudy and 1-week retention of action events (e.g. “water the plant”). In addition, we investigated if the type of recall practice (noun-cued vs. verb-cued) moderates these testing benefits. The results showed an indirect testing effect that increased following noun-cued recall of verbs as compared to verb-cued recall of nouns. In contrast, a direct testing effect on the forgetting rate of performed actions was not reliably observed, neither for noun- nor verb-cued recall. Thus, to the extent that this study successfully dissociated direct and indirect testing-based enhancements, they seem to be differentially effective for performed actions, and may rely on partially different mechanisms.     

视觉工作记忆中的特征捆绑

特征捆绑是认知科学和神经科学研究的前沿问题,近来已经成为研究者们关于意识问题争论的焦点所在。很多心理活动涉及复杂对象各种特征的捆绑,在工作记忆中保持这些捆绑的机制是心理加工得以有效进行的基础。视觉工作记忆中的特征捆绑近来成为研究热点之一,有关研究大多凭借变化检测范式和单刺激探测范式,探讨了视觉工作记忆中捆绑特征的保持是否需要注意参与,以及分离特征存储和捆绑特征存储的关系等问题,但目前这些问题仍都没有明确的答案。