Although small children have autobiographical memories, as they grow, they forget its specific details. Although this forgetting is common in early childhood, the presence of effective cues may help recall autobiographical memories. This study examines the effect of verbal and visual cues on the long-term maintenance of a school trip…

Stress influences how we remember emotional events and how these events shape future behaviors. However, the impact of stress on memory specificity for emotional events has yet to be examined. To this end, the present study utilized a mnemonic discrimination task that taxes hippocampal pattern separation, the process of distinguishing between…

Through the process of "reconsolidation," reminders can temporarily destabilize memories and render them vulnerable to change. Recent rodent research has proposed that prediction error, or the element of surprise, is a key component of this process; yet, this hypothesis has never before been extended to complex episodic memories in…

An experiment was conducted in which the face-name mnemonic was applied to the task of associating 14 artists' names with two styles of their artwork, portraits and thematic paintings. Following study of the 28 items, mnemonic students outperformed "own best method" control students on both immediate and delayed matching tests. Further,…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the inclusion of nonessential music in an instructional multimedia presentation affected learners' ability to recall information in retention, cued-retention, and transfer cognitive measures. This study tested the coherence principle of multimedia learning which holds that the addition of…

Objective: Memory loss affects a large proportion of older adults. Research indicates a positive association between memory training and better memory performance as people age. However, studies on specific memory training using an experimental design are limited. This study explored whether memory training has improved memory performance in a…

Performance on verbal and mathematical tasks is enhanced when participants shift from using algorithms to retrieving information directly from memory (Siegler, 1988a). However, it is unknown whether a shift to retrieval is involved in dynamic spatial skill acquisition. For example, do athletes mentally extrapolate the trajectory of the ball, or do…

Four experiments used rats to study false context fear memories. In Experiment 1, rats were pre-exposed to a distinctive chamber (context A) or to a control environment (context C), shocked after a delay in a second chamber (context B) and tested either in B or A. Rats pre-exposed to A froze just as much as control rats in B but more than control…

The authors report two studies that examined how native- and second-language skills were related to second-language reading difficulties for native Chinese-speaking fourth graders learning to read English. In study 1, 50 poor English readers with Chinese-reading difficulties (the PB group) and 34 poor English readers without Chinese-reading…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether the underlying phonological impairment in dyslexia is associated with a deficit in categorizing regional dialects. Method: Twenty adults with dyslexia, 20 school-age children with dyslexia, and 40 corresponding control listeners with average reading ability listened to sentences produced…

This article proves statistically the effectiveness of humour in the teaching of English and German to Spanish students of foreign languages. The referred lexicon is particularly troublemaking because of the difficulties that such vocabulary poses for Spanish learners of not-Latin-originated languages. The approach followed is a quantitative and…

The present web-based study (N = 840) aimed to illuminate the cognitive mechanisms underlying self-disorders in autism. Initially, participants selected three self-defining memories. Then, we assessed their capacity to give meaning to these events (i.e., meaning making), their tendency to scrutinize autobiographical memory to better understand…

This study examined the effects on attitudes and lifestyle behavior of "Jog your Mind," a multi-factorial community-based program promoting cognitive vitality among seniors with no known cognitive impairment. A quasi-experimental study was conducted. Twenty-three community organizations were assigned either to the experimental group…

Evidence suggests that some cognitive processes are based on sensorimotor systems in the brain (embodied cognition). The premise of this is that "Biological brains are first and foremost the control systems for biological bodies". It has therefore been suggested that both online cognition (processing as we move through the world) and…

Memory can be distorted by misleading post-event information. These memory distortions may have serious consequences, for example in eyewitness testimony. Many situations in which memory reports are solicited, and suggestive or misleading information is presented, are highly stressful for the respondent, yet little is known about how stress…