Revaluation manipulations produce emergence of underselected stimuli following simultaneous discrimination in humans

Stimulus overselectivity occurs when only one of potentially many aspects of the environment controls behaviour. In four experiments, human participants were trained and tested on a trial-and-error simultaneous discrimination task involving two two-element compound stimuli. Overselectivity emerged in all experiments (i.e., one element from the reinforced compound controlled behaviour at the expense of the other). Following revaluation (extinction) of the previously overselected stimulus, behavioural control by the underselected stimulus element emerged without any direct training of that stimulus element. However, while a series of extinction manipulations targeting the revaluation of the overselected stimulus produced differential extinction of that stimulus, they did not result in differential emergence of the previously underselected stimuli. The results are discussed with respect to the theoretical implications for attention-based accounts of overselectivity.     

Retrospective recall of affect in clinically depressed individuals and controls

The current study examined the nature of retrospective recall of affect in depressed participants and nonclinical controls. Utilising the Experience Sampling Method, we compared average momentary affect reports to retrospective summaries of the same period of time. Both groups exhibited exaggerated retrospective summaries of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). Greater bias for PA than NA was found in the controls but not the depressed. Across groups, depressed individuals exhibited more absolute inaccuracy in their recall of NA but not PA. For depressed and nonclinical individuals, retrospective summaries of PA were better predicted by an average of all weekly momentary PA than a combination of the most intense (“peak”) PA and most recent (“end”) PA experiences. For nonclinical participants, retrospective NA was better predicted by an average of all weekly momentary NA. For depressed individuals, however, no clear advantage to predicting retrospective NA by average weekly NA relative to a combination of peak NA and end NA was found. Based on our findings, clinicians should realise that depressive cognition may not lie in recall that is less positive and more negative than “reality” but in retrospective intensifications of all affect that are, compared to normal, relatively greater for negative than for positive affect.     

The Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire: A population-based random sampling study

The Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ) has been shown to have acceptable reliability and factorial, predictive, and concurrent validity. However, the PRMQ has never been administered to a probability sample survey representative of all ages in adulthood, nor have previous studies controlled for factors that are known to influence metamemory, such as affective status. Here, the PRMQ was applied in a survey adopting a probabilistic three-stage cluster sample representative of the population of São Paulo, Brazil, according to gender, age (20–80 years), and economic status (n=1042). After excluding participants who had conditions that impair memory (depression, anxiety, used psychotropics, and/or had neurological/psychiatric disorders), in the remaining 664 individuals we (a) used confirmatory factor analyses to test competing models of the latent structure of the PRMQ, and (b) studied effects of gender, age, schooling, and economic status on prospective and retrospective memory complaints. The model with the best fit confirmed the same tripartite structure (general memory factor and two orthogonal prospective and retrospective memory factors) previously reported. Women complained more of general memory slips, especially those in the first 5 years after menopause, and there were more complaints of prospective than retrospective memory, except in participants with lower family income.     

Thwarting the renewal (relapse) of conditioned fear with the explicitly unpaired procedure: Possible interpretations and implications for treating human fears and phobias

In three experiments using the barpress conditioned suppression task with albino rats, we studied the renewal (relapse) of conditioned fear in an ABA fear-renewal paradigm. We found that explicitly unpaired (EU) deliveries of conditioned stimuli (CSs) and unconditioned stimuli (USs) in Context B thwarted fear renewal in Context A. Evidence contraindicated a suggestion by Rauhut, Thomas, and Ayres (2001) that US habituation plays a key role in this effect. For example, renewal was thwarted only when EU CSs and USs were intermingled rather than given in succession. The possibility that EU treatments thwart renewal by creating a CS that inhibits fear in the test context also received no support. Thus, summation and retardation tests in Context A found no evidence that the EU CS became inhibitory, finding instead evidence for a residual excitation. Other possible interpretations of the results and some implications for clinical practice are noted.     

Radial maze analog for pigeons: Evidence for flexible coding strategies may result from faulty assumptions

Previous research with the radial maze has found evidence that rats can remember both places that they have already been (retrospective coding) and places they have yet to visit (prospective coding; Cook, R. G., Brown, M. F., & Riley, D. A. (1985). Flexible memory processing by rats: Use of prospective and retrospective information in the radial maze. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behaviour Processes, 11, 453-469). Such dual coding also has been found in pigeons using a radial maze analog in which insertion of a delay at different points during a trial affects performance differentially depending on where in the trial it is inserted. When a delay is interpolated either early or late in a trial, there is minimal disruption of performance compared with when it is interpolated in the middle of the trial. However, the analysis required with this procedure requires the assumption that if errors made on control trials are subtracted from errors made in delay trials, the remaining errors can be directly attributed to the delay. But errors may also be attributed to the changing criterion for making a response as the trial proceeds. Furthermore, the animal’s tendency to choose alternatives in a systematic order may also affect its need to remember the sequence of choices made (and yet to be made) on each trial. In the present research, we avoided having to make this assumption by giving the pigeons a two-alternative choice at the time of testing and by randomly determining for the pigeon the order of predelay choices on each trial. This change in procedure resulted in comparable performance as a function of where in the trial the test occurred on both control and delay trials. The effect of the delay was to produce a general decrement in performance independent of where it occurred in the trial.     

Retrospective reflexivity: The residual and subliminal repercussions of researching war

Stories of the war have been a known part of my story as granddaughter of Polish post-war migrants. Yet venturing into these stories as researcher has been troubling; I found their closeness and their raw emotion difficult to process. Significant sections of my interview schedules entailed participants recounting their own, their parents' or their grandparents' stories of war and migration, with traumatic episodes frequently intersecting into their stories. As a researcher, these traumatic narratives have had a residual quality, lasting in my subconscious long after the interviews themselves and doctorate for which they were conducted had finished.In this paper, I focus on experiences of, and reactions to listening to, analysing and writing about these traumatic cultural memories. Collins (1998: 3.35) has observed that ‘the emotions experienced, whether by the interviewer or interviewee, are as real, as important and as interesting as any other product of the interview’; my powerfully felt experiences with traumatic content have validated this sentiment. With a retrospective reflexivity I now realise that these cultural memories were not the only ‘product’ of my research, but that how they were narrated and how I dealt with them were also a significant part of the research process, and indeed stories in themselves. Here I attempt to retell how these stories impacted me as the researcher; how in the case of particularly harrowing stories, I also needed time to absorb the narratives, to comprehend the participant's experiences and their ability to narrate such stories, and to recover from the experience of listening to such accounts.     

Prospective memory across the lifespan: Investigating the contribution of retrospective and prospective processes

Prospective memory performance follows an inverted U-shaped function across the lifespan. Findings on the relative contribution of purely prospective memory and retrospective memory processes within prospective memory to this trajectory are scarce and inconclusive. We analyzed age-related differences in prospective memory performance across the lifespan in a cross-sectional design including six age groups (N = 99, 7–83 years) and investigated possible mechanisms by experimentally disentangling the relative contributions of retrospective memory and purely prospective memory processes. Results confirmed the inverted U-shaped function of prospective memory performance across the lifespan. A significant interaction between process type and age group was observed indicating differential relative contributions of retrospective memory and purely prospective memory processes on the development of prospective memory performance. Our results showed that mainly the pure prospective memory processes within prospective memory lead to lower prospective memory performance in young children and old adults. Moreover, the relative contributions of the retrospective memory and purely prospective memory processes are not uniform at both ends of the lifespan, i.e., in later adulthood the purely prospective memory processes seem to determine performance to an even greater extent than in childhood. Nevertheless, age effects were also observed in the retrospective component which thus contributed to the prospective memory performance differences between the age groups.