In this study, the authors investigated the relationship between autobiographical memory and the onset and maintenance of distressing memories following cancer. In Study 1, participants recently diagnosed with head, neck, or lung cancer were assessed for acute stress disorder (ASD). Participants with ASD reported fewer specific memories than did…

Differences in basic memory processes between maltreated and nonmaltreated children were examined in an experiment in which middle-socioeconomic-status (SES; N=60), low-SES maltreated (N=48), and low-SES nonmaltreated (N=51) children (ages 57, 89, and 10-12 years) studied 12 Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists. Using recall and recognition measures,…

This article aims to explore Executive Emotional System (EES) disruption as causal agent in frontal lobishness among abused children. The "Revised Senior South African Individual Scale" (SSAIS-R) was used to assess a sample population of seventy-five male and female subjects between the ages of 8 years 0 months and 16 years 11 months who were…

This review surveys the empirical literature for assessments of learning problems in children from a neuropsychological perspective. An evaluation of children with learning problems must consider measures of working memory, attention, executive function, and comprehension (listening and written), particularly for children who do not respond to…

Reference set computation -- the construction of a (global) comparison set to determine whether a given derivation is appropriate in context -- comes with a processing cost. I argue that this cost is directly visible at the acquisition stage: In those linguistic areas in which it has been independently established that such computation is indeed…

Generation is thought to enhance both item-specific and relational processing of generated targets as compared with read words (M. A. McDaniel & P. J. Waddill, 1990). Generation facilitates encoding of the cue-target relation and sometimes boosts encoding of relations across list items. Of interest is whether generation can also increase the…

This study inspected the processes of verifying the current discourse constituent against the referents that it passively cues during reading. It seemed plausible that, after understanding "The customer ate pancakes," the processes of fully understanding "The waiter implied that the customer ate eggs" might resemble those of intentionally…

The role of interference effects in sentence processing has recently begun to receive attention, however whether these effects arise during encoding or retrieval remains unclear. This paper draws on basic memory research to help distinguish these explanations and reports data from an experiment that manipulates the possibility for retrieval…

In 7 experiments, the authors explored whether visual attention (the ability to select relevant visual information) and visual working memory (the ability to retain relevant visual information) share the same content representations. The presence of singleton distractors interfered more strongly with a visual search task when it was accompanied by…

This research demonstrates how prior knowledge may allow for qualitative differences in representation of texts about controversial issues. People often experience a memory bias in favor of information with which they agree. In several experiments it was found that individuals with high prior knowledge about the topic were better able to recall…

Does repetition blindness represent a failure of perception or of memory? In Experiment 1, participants viewed rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sentences. When critical words (C1 and C2) were orthographically similar, C2 was frequently omitted from serial report; however, repetition priming for C2 on a postsentence lexical decision task was…

Cued recall with an extralist cue poses a challenge for contemporary memory theory in that there is a need to explain how episodic and semantic information are combined. A parallel activation and intersection approach proposes one such means by assuming that an experimental cue will elicit its preexisting semantic network and a context cue will…

In contrast to exemplar and decision-bound categorization models, the memory and contrast models described here do not assume that long-term representations of stimulus magnitudes are available. Instead, stimuli are assumed to be categorized using only their differences from a few recent stimuli. To test this alternative, the authors examined…

E. Hirshman, J. Fisher, T. Henthom, J. Amdt, and A. Passanname (2002) found that Midazolam disrupts the mirror-patterned word-frequency effect for recognition memory by reversing the typical hit-rate advantage for low-frequency words. They noted that this result is consistent with dual-process accounts (e.g., R. C. Atkinson & J. F. Juola, 1974; G.…

S. W. Allen and L. R. Brooks (1991) have shown that exemplar memory can affect categorization even when participants are provided with a classification rule. G. Regehr and L. R. Brooks (1993) argued that stimuli must be individuated for such effects to occur. In this study, the authors further analyze the conditions that yield exemplar effects in…