Reports on differences between remembering the past and imagining the future have led to the hypothesis that constructing future events is a more cognitively demanding process. However, factors that influence these increased demands, such as whether the event has been previously constructed and the types of details comprising the event, have…

There has been considerable focus on investigating age-related memory changes in cognitively healthy older adults, in the absence of neurodegenerative disorders. Previous studies have reported age-related domain-specific changes in older adults, showing increased difficulty encoding and processing object information but minimal to no impairment in…

We examined whether increasing retrieval difficulty in a spatial memory task would promote the recruitment of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) similar to what is typically observed during remote memory retrieval. Rats were trained on the hidden platform version of the Morris Water Task and tested three or 30 d later. Retrieval difficulty was…

Stereoscopic technology (3D) is rapidly becoming ubiquitous across research, entertainment and informal educational settings. Children of today may grow up never knowing a time when movies, television and video games were not available stereoscopically. Despite this rapid expansion, the field's understanding of the impact of stereoscopic…

Working memory is typically defined as a system devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and processing of information. However, the interplay between these 2 functions is still a matter of debate in the literature, with views ranging from complete independence to complete dependence. The time-based resource-sharing model assumes that a central…

We validate an eye-tracking method applicable for studying memory processes in complex cognitive tasks. The method is tested with a task on probabilistic inferences from memory. It provides valuable data on the time course of processing, thus clarifying previous results on heuristic probabilistic inference. Participants learned cue values of…

The first purpose of this study was to investigate whether the visuospatial working memory (VSWM) skills of 15-16-year-old pupils with difficulties in mathematics differ from those of their normally achieving peers. The goal was to broaden the view of the complex system of VSWM. A set of passive and active VSWM tasks was used. The study's second…

This paper reports the results of four dual-task experiments that were designed to determine the extent of domain-specificity of the verbal working memory resources used in linguistic integrations. To address this question, syntactic complexity was crossed in a 2x2 design with the complexity of a secondary task, which involved either (1)…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of aging on the storage of visual and spatial working memory according to Logie's model of working memory (1995). In a first experiment young, elderly, and very old subjects carried out two tasks usually used to measure visual span (Visual Patterns Test) and spatial span (Corsi Block Tapping test).…

Four groups of children (N=80; C.A. 6.6. to 12.5; M.A. 7.9 to 14.7) were tested for ability to reproduce five-element two- and three-dimensional patterns. Significant interaction and main effects were found. Three-dimensional pattern performance increased with age; all ages performed well on two-dimensional patterns. (Author/DB)

Tests seven- , 10- , and 13-year-olds for developmental differences in processes and strategies involved in geometric matrix solution and the relationship between strategy differences and item complexity. (AS)

The final report consists of three studies on aspects of a common theme, that a hearing impaired (HI) person's performance on information processing tasks depends on interactions of that person's cognitive structure and strategies with properties of materials to be processed and task demands. The first study, "Recall of Temporal/Spatial…

A pilot study on the development and administration of a test using a spatial reasoning problem, the 15-puzzle, is described. The test utilizes on-line capabilities of a real-time computer to record an examinee's progress on each problem through a sequence of problem-solving "moves", and to collect additional on-line data that might be…