Human Memory

Models of human memory.

by Guy Tiberghien

La simulation cognitive de la mémoire humaine

by Guy Tiberghien

Sleep-Dependent Consolidation of Statistical Learning

by Scott Cairney

Sleep and environmental context: interactive effects for memory

by Scott Cairney

The impact of overnight consolidation upon memory for emotional and neutral encoding contexts.

by Scott Cairney

Efectos del Olvido Dirigido con el Método de las Palabras : una comparación entre pruebas directas e indirectas de memoria

by Emiliano Díez

(Directed forgetting effects with the word method: A comparison of direct and indirect memory tests)

Authors:

Alonso, Mª Angeles Alonso: Universidad de La Laguna
Díez, Emiliano: Universidad de Salamanca

Resumen

En el presente estudio se analizaron los efectos del olvido dirigido en pruebas directas... more Resumen

En el presente estudio se analizaron los efectos del olvido dirigido en pruebas directas (reconocimiento y recuerdo) e indirectas (categorización y detección de letras). Los resultados mostraron que las palabras marcadas para aprender se recordaban mejor y se reconocían más rápido y con mayor precisión que las marcadas para olvidar. Este patrón de resultados se replicó con la prueba de categorización. Sin embargo, no se encontró olvido dirigido en la prueba de detección de letras. Los resultados se discuten en función de la hipótesis basada en el repaso diferencial como mecanismo implicado en el olvido dirigido con el método de las palabras.

Abstract

Effects of directed forgetting on direct (recognition and free recall) and indirect (categorization and letter detection) memory tests were analyzed. The results showed better recognition for "remember" than for "forget" words. The results showed better recognition for "remember" than for "forget" words. These results were replicated in the categorization test. However, directed forgetting was not found on the letter-detection test. The results are discussed in relation to the differential encoding hypothesis.

Why some faces won't be remembered: Brain potentials illuminate successful versus unsuccessful encoding of same-race and other-race faces

by Heather Lucas

Does Memory Modification Threaten Our Authenticity?

by Alexandre Erler

Neuroethics 4:3 (2011), 235-249, DOI 10.1007/s12152-010-9090-4

A discussion of the question whether memory modification technologies threaten the authenticity of our lives. My... more A discussion of the question whether memory modification technologies threaten the authenticity of our lives. My central claim is that one particular form of memory modification, memory editing, can lead us to lead an inauthentic life, in two main ways: first, by threatening its truthfulness, and secondly, by interfering with our disposition to respond in certain ways to some past events, when we have reasons to respond in such ways. This gives us a significant moral reason not to manipulate our memory in ways that would lead to such an outcome.

Pluralistic-unitarism, an integrating proposal for the study of human memory

by Piotr Trzesniak

Silveira, R. A. T. da; Trzesniak, P.; Stein, L. M. (2010): Pluralistic-unitarism, an integrating proposal for the study of human memory. Ciência & Cognição v. 15 (2), 42-54.

(artigo também disponível em português na página de Piotr Trzesniak em academia.edu)

A classification of the different memory mechanisms is a necessary step for the development of a Science of human... more A classification of the different memory mechanisms is a necessary step for the development of a Science of human memory. Without such classification, the scientific initiatives do not possess an integrated overview of its object of study, a condition that tends to reduce the knowledge-building efficacy of the research efforts, which are carried out insulated among themselves. In this article, we evaluate the two main proposals about the mechanisms of memory (unitarism and pluralism) from its epistemological feasibility. Historically, unitarism does not constitute a promising line of inquiry, while pluralism showed to be fruitful for the expansion of memory studies. Despite that, we defend the need to follow a third road, which takes advantage of the virtues of both ways of approach, being at the same time able to avoid their limitations.

On Memory and Imagination in the Cinema

by Martin Lefebvre

Published in New Literary History, Vol. 30, no. 2. 1999

Ecstasy (MDMA) and Memory Function: a Meta-Analytic Update

by Keith Laws

Laws KR & Kokkalis J (2007)

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the impact of recreational ecstasy use on short-term memory (STM), long-term... more A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the impact of recreational ecstasy use on short-term memory (STM), long-term memory (LTM), verbal and visual memory.We located 26 studies containing memory data for ecstasy and non-ecstasy users from which effect sizes could be derived. The analyses provided measures of STM and LTMin 610 and 439 ecstasy users and revealed moderate-to-large effect sizes (Cohen’s d) of d=0.63 and d=0.87, respectively. The difference between STM versus LTM was non-significant. The effect size for verbal memory was large (d=1.00) and significantly larger than the small effect size for visual memory (d=0.27). Indeed, our analyses indicate that visual memory may be affected more by concurrent cannabis use. Finally, we found that the total lifetime number of ecstasy tablets consumed did not significantly predict memory performance.

'Normal'Semantic-Phonemic Fluency Discrepancy In Alzheimer's Disease? A Meta-Analytic Study.

by Keith Laws

Laws KR, Duncan A & Gale TM

In a meta-analysis of 135 studies involving 6000 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and 6057 healthy controls, we... more In a meta-analysis of 135 studies involving 6000 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and 6057 healthy controls, we examined the relative degree of semantic and phonemic fluency impairment in AD patients. The effect size for semantic fluency (d =2.10: 95%CI 2.22–1.97) was significantly larger than for both phonemic fluency (d =1.46: 95%CI 1.56–1.36) and picture naming (d =1.54: 95%CI 1.66–1.40). In meta-regression analyses we found that studies with greater proportions of female patients and less severe dementia both led to better phonemic fluency; while perhaps surprisingly, increased patient education led to worse semantic fluency. Critically, in 50 studies measuring both semantic and phonemic
fluency, the effect size for the semantic–phonemic discrepancy scores did not differ between AD patients and controls; and was unrelated to any of the moderator variables. The latter findings indicate that the semantic–phonemic fluency discrepancy measure often reported as an important distinguishing characteristic of AD patients may be an exaggerated normal tendency.

Sex Differences In Lexical Size Across Semantic Categories

by Keith Laws

Recent studies have reported that males show better naming of nonliving things than females, while females show better... more Recent studies have reported that males show better naming of nonliving things than females, while females show better naming of living things than males. Such effects may reflect sex differences in the size of lexicons across categories or their access/retrieval strategies. These possibilities were examined in three experiments using semantic fluency tasks for two living (animals, fruits) and two nonliving (tools, vehicles) categories. Experiment 1docu mented better fluency for ‘fruits’ in females (n=300) and for ‘tools’ and ‘vehicles’ in males (n=300). Experiment 2 examined fluency consistency by re-testing a subgroup of subjects again 30 min later. This confirmed the pattern across sex and revealed that subjects reproduced 70% of the same words (even when not instructed to do so). Finally, in Experiment 3, a new sample of male and
female subjects was tested for 4 min to exhaust their fluency lexicons and overcome access/strategy effects. This confirmed the female advantage for fruits and male advantage for tools. These findings are consistent with differences in the size of lexicons for males and females and are attributed to sex differences in domain-specific processing systems.

A 'Normal'Category-Specific Advantage for Naming Living Things

by Keith Laws

Laws KR & Neve C (1999)

`Artefactual' accounts of category-speci®c disorders for living things have highlighted that compared to nonliving... more `Artefactual' accounts of category-speci®c disorders for living things have highlighted that compared to nonliving things, living things have lower name frequency, lower concept familiarity and greater visual complexity and greater within-category structural similarity or `visual crowding'. These hypotheses imply that de®cits for living things are an exaggeration of some `normal tendency'. Contrary to these notions, we found that normal subjects were consistently worse at naming nonliving than living things in a speeded presentation paradigm. Moreover, their naming was not predicted by concept familiarity, name frequency or visual complexity; however, a novel measure of visual familiarity (i.e. for the appearance of things) did signifcantly predict naming. We propose that under speeded conditions, normal subjects and nonliving things harder to name because their representations are less visually predictable than for living things (i.e. nonliving things show greater within-item structural variability). Finally, because nonliving things have multiple representations in the real world, this may lower the probability of finding impaired naming and recognition in this category.

The Hatfield Image Test (HIT): A New Picture Test and Norms for Experimental and Clinical Use

by Keith Laws

Adlington RL, Laws KR & Gale TM (2009)

We present a new corpus of 147 high-quality photographic colour images (the Hatfield Image Test: HIT). Existing sets... more We present a new corpus of 147 high-quality photographic colour images (the Hatfield Image Test: HIT). Existing sets of pictorial stimuli tend to be line drawn, contain many items that are readily identifiable by healthy participants, and, therefore, have an inherent tendency towards ceiling effects in the normal population. The broad range of item difficulty and range of semantic subcategories in the HIT permits researchers to select stimuli of appropriate difficulty as required. We present naming data from 152 healthy participants. Additionally, we present mean ratings for each item on several widely used psycholinguistic variables: age of acquisition, colour diagnosticity, familiarity, name agreement (and the H statistic), visual complexity, and word frequency. These stimuli provide a useful corpus for experimental and clinical researchers.

False Memories and Delusional Ideation In Normal Healthy Subjects

by Keith Laws

Studies have reported substantial mnestic deficits in patients with schizophrenia. Most of this research, however, has... more Studies have reported substantial mnestic deficits in patients with schizophrenia. Most of this research, however, has focussed on errors of omission (poor recall/recognition) rather than commission (such as false recall/recognition). Nevertheless, recent studies report that schizophrenics show increased false recognition and speculate that this may underpin delusional ideation (Moritz et al., 2004). No previous study has examined whether such memory problems exist in normal individuals who may be prone to delusional thinking.
Using the Roediger and McDermott (1995) paradigm, we investigated memory functioning in 105 normal healthy subjects divided according to performance on a measure of delusional ideation (Peters et al. Delusional Inventory: PDI Peters et al., 1999). We found significantly poorer recall in the high than low PDI group. Moreover, high PDI scorers also made more false-alarm memory recalls than low PDI scorers.
In a recognition test, high and low PDI subjects did not differ in the confidence they attached to recognition of studied items, but high PDI subjects gave greater confidence for falsely accepting unseen items. This suggests that healthy subjects scoring high on a measure of delusional thinking do show an increased tendency to make false positives, but not to make false negative memory judgements.

No Category Specificity In Alzheimer's Disease: A Normal Aging Effect

by Keith Laws

The authors examined category effects on tasks of picture naming, naming to definition, and word–picture matching in... more The authors examined category effects on tasks of picture naming, naming to definition, and word–picture matching in 38 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and 30 elderly controls. Each task was matched across category on all “nuisance” variables known to differ across domains. Standard analyses
revealed significant category disadvantages for classifying living things in AD patients but also for elderly controls on each task. To overcome the ceiling effect in controls, the authors conducted 1,000 bootstrap analyses of covariance, with control performance as a difficulty index covariate. These covariate analyses eliminated the category effect in AD patients on all 3 tasks. Indeed, the authors report that control performance accounted for 64% (picture naming), 49% (naming to description), and 42% (word–picture matching) of variance in AD performance. This suggests that, although category effects in AD patients do not reflect intrinsic variables, the size and direction of the category effect are not different from those in elderly controls.

… Naming Errors in Normal Subjects: The Influence of Evolution and Experience* 1

by Keith Laws

Laws KR

The importance of ‘‘artifactual’’ variables (such as conceptual familiarity) have been highlighted in current accounts... more The importance of ‘‘artifactual’’ variables (such as conceptual familiarity) have been highlighted in current accounts of category-specific disorders for living things (e.g., Funnell & Sheridan, 1992). The difficulties experienced by patients are essentially viewed as an exaggeration of normal processes and the implication is that normal subjects should also have greater difficulty naming living items (because they have lower conceptual familiarity than nonliving things). The current study examined normal subjects’ ability to name pictures of artifact-matched sets of living and nonliving things in a naming-to-deadline paradigm. Contrary to the prediction, normal subjects made more nonliving naming errors. Furthermore, female subjects made more nonliving-thing errors than male subjects. These findings could not be reduced to differences in either category-based or gender-based familiarity ratings. Rather, it is proposed that an elaborated domain-specific evolutionary model parsimoniously explains both the greater incidence of living thing deficits in patients and the better performance of normal subjects with living things.

"Hollows of Experience"

by Gregory Nixon

@ *Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research* I (3), April 2010, 234-288.

This essay is divided into two parts, deeply intermingled. Part I examines not only the origin of conscious experience... more This essay is divided into two parts, deeply intermingled. Part I examines not only the origin of conscious experience but also how it is possible to ask of our own consciousness how it came to be. Part II examines the origin of experience itself, which soon reveals itself as the ontological question of Being. The chief premise of Part I chapter is that symbolic communion and the categorizations of language have enabled human organisms to distinguish between themselves as actually existing entities and their own immediate experience of themselves and their world. This enables them to reflect upon abstract concepts, including “self,” “experience,” and “world.” Symbolic communication and conceptualization grow out of identification, the act of first observing conscious experiencing and intimating what it is like, mimesis, a gestural proto-language learned through imitation, and reflection, seeing oneself through the eyes of others. The step into actual intentional speech is made through self-assertion, narrative, and in-tersubjectivity. These three become the spiral of human cultural development that includes not only the adaptive satisfaction of our biological needs, but also the creativity of thought. With the mental-conceptual separation of subject and object — of self and world — the human ability to witness the universe (and each other) is the ground of our genuinely human quality. Consciousness gives human life its distinctively human reality. It is, therefore, one and the same ability that enables us to shape planet Earth by means of conceptual representations (rather than by means of our hands alone) while also awakening us to the significance of being.

Looking beyond human self-consciousness to investigate the origin and nature of awareness itself in Part 2, reductive objective materialism is found to be of little use. Direct experience also falls short in that, in order to be transformed into objective knowledge about itself, it must always be interpreted through and limited by the symbolic contexts of culture and the idiosyn-cratic conceptualizations of the individual. Awareness in itself must thus be considered ultimately unexplainable, but this may more indicate its inexpressible transcendence of all symbolic qualifiers than its nonexistence. It is suggested that awareness is not “self-aware” (as in deity) but is instead unknowing yet identical with the only true universal: the impetus of crea-tive unfolding. Our human knowledge, as an expression of this unfolding, is seen to emerge from our conscious experiencing and, in turn, to have the power — and enormous responsibility — of directing that experience. Our underlying symbolic worldviews are found to be autopoietic: They limit or open our conscious experience, which, in turn, confirms those worldview expectations. As we explore a future of unforeseeable technological breakthroughs on an ailing planet who patiently copes with our “success,” truly vital decisions about the nature, meaning, and future of conscious experience will have to be made.

"From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience: The Continuum of Experience"

by Gregory Nixon

@ *Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research* I (3), April 2010, 216-233.

When so much is being written on conscious experience, it is past time to face the question whether experience happens... more When so much is being written on conscious experience, it is past time to face the question whether experience happens that is not conscious of itself. The recognition that we and most other living things experience non-consciously has recently been firmly supported by experimental science, clinical studies, and theoretic investigations; the related if not identical philosophic notion of experience without a subject has a rich pedigree. Leaving aside the question of how experience could become conscious of itself, I aim here to demonstrate that the terms experience and consciousness are not interchangeable. Experience is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down, but I see non-conscious experience as based mainly in momentary sensations, relational between bodies or systems, and probably common throughout the natural world. If this continuum of experience — from non-conscious, to conscious, to self-transcending awareness — can be understood and accepted, radical constructivism (the “outside” world as a construct of experience) will gain a firmer foundation, panexperientialism (a living universe) may gain credibility, and psi will find its medium.