Working memory is the limited capacity storage system involved in the maintenance and manipulation of information over short periods of time. Previous imaging studies have suggested that the frontoparietal regions are activated during working memory tasks; a putative association between the structure of the frontoparietal regions and working…

Eighty 4- to 9-year-old children answered factual knowledge questions in math, science and social studies during one-on-one interviews. Children indicated whether they had known or guessed each answer, and whether they (a) remembered the moment they learned the answer (episodic response) or (b) did not remember. For episodic responses, children…

The effects of embedding standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists into stories whose context biased interpretation either toward or away from the overall themes of the DRM lists on both true and false recognition were investigated with 7- and 11-year-olds. These biased story contexts were compared with the same children's susceptibility to…

We newly propose that the vigilance decrement occurs because the cognitive control system fails to maintain active the goal of the vigilance task over prolonged periods of time (goal habituation). Further, we hypothesized that momentarily deactivating this goal (via a switch in tasks) would prevent the activation level of the vigilance goal from…

Recent findings indicate that retained information tends to converge at the basic level (BL). The aim of the present study was to apply these findings to the investigation of misinformation phenomena. In three experiments, we examined the extent to which the contaminating effects of misinformation are influenced by its consistency with the…

An experimental mock eyewitness study is reported that compared Free and reverse order recall of an empirically informed scripted crime event. Proponents of reverse order recall suggest it facilitates recovery of script incidental information and increases the total amount of information recalled. However, compared with free recall it was found to…

Interference is reduced in mostly incongruent relative to mostly congruent lists. Classic accounts of this list-wide proportion congruence effect assume that list-level control processes strategically modulate word reading. Contemporary accounts posit that reliance on the word is modulated poststimulus onset by item-specific information (e.g.,…

In the lateralized change detection task, two item arrays are presented, one on each side of the display. Participants have to remember the items in the relevant hemifield and ignore the items in the irrelevant hemifield. A difference wave between contralateral and ipsilateral slow potentials with respect to the relevant items, the contralateral…

Memory functions involve three stages: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Modulating effects of glucocorticoids (GCs) have been consistently observed for declarative memory with GCs enhancing encoding and impairing retrieval, but surprisingly, little is known on how GCs affect memory consolidation. Studies in rats suggest a beneficial effect…

Rats were able to search multiple food cups in a foraging task and successfully return to a fixed, but not a variable, start location. Reducing the number of food cups to be searched resulted in an improvement in performance in the variable start condition. Performance was better when only one or two food cups had to be visited but was still…

Signaling pathways necessary for memory formation, such as the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway, appear highly conserved across species and paradigms. Learning that food is inedible (LFI) represents a robust form of associative, operant learning that induces short- (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) in "Aplysia." We investigated the…

In humans lacunar infarcts in the mesial and anterior regions of the thalami are frequently associated with amnesic syndromes. In this review paper, we scrutinized 41 papers published between 1983 and 2009 that provided data on a total of 83 patients with the critical ischemic lesions (i.e. 17 patients with right-sided lesions, 25 with left-sided…

Can false memories have a positive consequence on human cognition? In two experiments, we investigated whether false memories could prime insight problem-solving tasks. Children and adults were asked to solve compound remote associate task (CRAT) problems, half of which had been primed by the presentation of Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists…

We reexamine the role of time in the loss of information from working memory, the limited information accessible for cognitive tasks. The controversial issue of whether working memory deteriorates over time was investigated using arrays of unconventional visual characters. Each array was followed by a postperceptual mask, a variable retention…

Background: We conducted a comprehensive and systematic assessment of memory functioning in drug-naive boys with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Methods: Boys performed verbal and spatial working memory (WM) component (storage and central executive) and verbal and spatial storage load tasks,…