Intentional memory and online data collection: A test of the effects of animacy and threat on episodic memory

As research in the behavioural sciences increasingly relies on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for recruiting participants, it is an empirical question whether an intentional memory experiment could be conducted online and whether performance of MTurk participants and college students would be comparable. College students and MTurk participants viewed threatening and nonthreatening items that were animate or inanimate and completed a recall test. Recent research indicates that human memory systems evolved to prioritise survival-relevant information, including animacy of items. The results of both studies indicated that participants recalled more animate than inanimate items and recalled more threatening items than nonthreatening items. The results indicate that it is possible to conduct memory experiments online and that results match patterns found in laboratory studies of the animacy effect (Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, & LeBreton, 2013), but that researchers should include safeguards to ensure the online participants are attending to and following directions.     

Walking through doorways differentially affects recall and familiarity

Previous research has reported that walking through a doorway to a new location makes memory for objects and events experienced in the previous location less accurate. This effect, termed the location updating effect, has been used to suggest that location changes are used to mark boundaries between events in memory: memories for objects encountered within the current event are more available than those from beyond an event boundary. Within a computer‐generated memory task, participants navigated through virtual rooms, walking through doorways, and interacting with objects. The accuracy and their subjective experience of their memory for the objects (remember/know and confidence) were assessed. The findings showed that shifts in location decreased accurate responses associated with the subjective experience of remembering but not those associated with the experience of knowing, even when considering only the most confident responses in each condition. These findings demonstrate that a shift in location selectively impacts recollection and so contributes to our understanding of boundaries in event memory.     

Neural correlates of successful and unsuccessful verbal memory encoding

Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that episodic memory encoding involves a network of neocortical structures which may act interdependently with medial temporal lobe (mTL) structures to promote the formation of durable memories, and that activation in certain structures is modulated according to task performance. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to determine the neural structures recruited during a verbal episodic encoding task and to examine the relationship between activation during encoding and subsequent recognition memory performance across subjects. Our results show performance-correlated activation during encoding both in neocortical and medial temporal structures. Neocortical activations associated with later successful and unsuccessful recognition memory were found to differ not only in magnitude, but also in hemispheric laterality. These performance-related hemispheric effects, which have not been previously reported, may correspond to between-subject differences in encoding strategy.     

Mental time travel into the episodic future,episodic past,and episodic counterfactual past in everyday life

To date, studies exploring the relationship of counterfactual thoughts with episodic memories and episodic future thoughts have focused mainly on voluntary mental time travel. We explore mental time travel in everyday life and find that episodic counterfactual thinking occurs to a much lesser extent than thinking about the past or the future (12%, 22%, and 54%, respectively), is used mainly for mood regulation purposes, and the temporal distribution decreases as a function of time. We observe similarities in phenomenological detail: memories and counterfactual thoughts sharing similar ratings of sensory detail, memories and future thoughts sharing similar ratings of positivity, and counterfactual and future thoughts sharing similar ratings of mental time travel. We discuss the implications of episodic counterfactual thinking in everyday life.     

Proactive interference in working memory is related to adult age and cognitive factors: cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence from the Betula study

ABSTRACT

In working memory (WM), successful maintenance of information is affected by interference. Older adults may be especially susceptible to the effects of interference, which may cause age-related cognitive impairments. A relative score of IC was derived from cross-sectional (n = 869) and longitudinal (n = 443) data to investigate (1) if IC is reduced in normal aging, (2) if individual differences in IC related to individual performance in other cognitive domains, and (3) if 5-year change in IC is related to change in general cognition. Older age was associated with reduced IC, but no decline in IC occurred over 5 years. Also, the ability to control interference in WM was related to performance in episodic memory, verbal fluency, and block design. We also found that IC mediates the relationship between age and cognition, suggesting that age-related cognitive decline is linked to IC. Finally, we demonstrate that change in IC was related to decline in episodic memory.     

The effect of ageing on recollection: the role of the binding updating process

The aim of this study was to highlight the underlying process responsible for the age-related deficit in recollection. Through two experiments using the Remember-Know-Guess procedure (Gardiner, J. M., & Richardson-Klavehn, A. [2000]. Remembering and knowing. In The Oxford handbook of memory (pp. 229–244). New York, NY: Oxford University Press) in recognition, we manipulated the opportunity to update bindings between target items and their encoding context, in young and older adults. In the first experiment we impaired the binding updating process during the encoding of items, while in the second we supported this process. The results indicated that the “Remember” responses in the younger group were specifically reduced by the impairment of the binding updating process (Exp. 1), suggesting that this ability is useful for them to encode a specific episode. Conversely, only the “Remember” responses in the older group were improved in accuracy by supporting the binding updating process (Exp. 2), suggesting that their weakness in this ability is the source of their failure to improve the accuracy of their memories. The overall results support the hypothesis that the age-related decline in episodic memory is partly due to a greater vulnerability to interference on bindings, impairing the ability to update content-context bindings as and when events occur.     

Drinking patterns and drunk-driving behaviour in Catalonia,Spain: A comparative study

This study explores three alcohol-related databases so as to provide a comprehensive understanding of drinking patterns and the prevalence of alcohol-impaired driving in Catalonia (Spain). The rate of alcohol-impaired drivers is compared with the percentage of drinkers in this population, with a particular focus on heavy episodic drinkers. Two strategies adopted by law enforcement agents when conducting alcohol breath tests are examined: (i) non-random and (ii) random approaches to roadblock location and driver selection. We find that heavy drinker profiles (in terms of age and gender) closely match those of alcohol-impaired drivers detected at strategically located, non-random sobriety checkpoints (especially in the case of female drivers), and that they also correlate with the age-gender distribution of drivers involved in road accidents with victims. Different drink driving patterns are detected when sobriety checkpoints are located randomly and drivers are tested at random. Older drivers are identified as a risk group as they abandon the safer driving habits in relation to alcohol shown when they were middle-aged. A combination of non-random and random controls would increase driver perception of their chances of being detected when drink driving. As such, the whole population, regardless of their drinking profile, would be alerted to the serious personal, social and legal implications of alcohol-impaired driving.     

‘Language of the past’ – Exploring past tense disruption during autobiographical narration in neurodegenerative disorders

Compromised retrieval of autobiographical memory (ABM) is well established in neurodegenerative disorders. The recounting of autobiographical events is inextricably linked to linguistic knowledge, yet no study to date has investigated whether tense use during autobiographical narration is disrupted in dementia syndromes. This study investigated the incidence of correct past tense use during ABM narration in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD, n = 10) and semantic dementia (SD, n = 10) in comparison with healthy older Controls (n = 10). Autobiographical narratives were analysed for episodic content (internal/external) and classified according to tense use (past/present). Across both patient groups, use of the past tense was significantly compromised relative to Controls, with increased levels of off‐target present tense verbs observed. Voxel‐based morphometry analyses based on structural MRI revealed differential associations between past tense use and regions of grey matter intensity in the brain. Bilateral temporal cortices were implicated in the SD group, whereas frontal, lateral, and medial temporal regions including the right hippocampus emerged in AD. This preliminary study provides the first demonstration of the disruption of specific linguistic constructs during autobiographical narration in AD and SD. Future studies are warranted to clarify at what point in the disease trajectory such deficits in tense use emerge, and whether these deficits are a product or contributing factor in memory disruption in these syndromes.     

LPN新／旧效应与汉字颜色来源提取的关联

已有研究表明,前额皮层在诸多种类来源的提取任务中起着重要作用,但不同记忆内容的来源提取研究存在不同的结果。为探索与汉字颜色来源提取相关联的头皮时空分布特征,本研究运用与Cycowicz等人(2001,2003,2005)相似的研究范式,以汉语名词作为实验材料,研究了颜色来源提取新/旧效应的头皮时空分布特征。结果显示,汉语名词在650~950ms存在与Cycowicz等人图形研究中相似的颜色来源提取的LPN新/旧效应。该结果表明,汉字的颜色来源提取与非言语材料一样,也与LPN新/旧效应相关联。     

客体档案理论的过去、现在和未来

客体档案理论是解释认知过程中如何形成时空表征连续性的重要理论之一。首先,从特征整合论所提出的客体档案概念出发,论述了客体档案模型及其实验依据,在此基础上对涉及客体档案形成、保持与更新的特点所存在的争论进行阐述,之后介绍了由客体档案理论新近发展成的事件档案理论及其依据,最后对目前客体档案研究中存在的一些热点问题如客体档案理论的核心假设和客体档案内部存储的信息类型及其关系等做出总结和展望