This study aimed to examine freshmen and senior college students' episodic and semantic memory use in classroom context regarding short and long time delays and college experience level. Data were collected in 2014 and 2017, right after students' final exams (T1) and 5 weeks later (T2). Students were given exemplar questions from their final exams…

Testing can improve later recall of information. However, much less is known about the potential use of testing in promoting the transfer of learning. In this study, we investigated whether testing improves decision-making performance on a transfer task in a sample of 98 university students using a between-subjects design. After studying several…

Prior knowledge, represented as a mental schema, has critical impact on how we organize, interpret, and process incoming information. Recent findings indicate that the use of an existing schema is coordinated by the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), communicating with parietal areas. The hippocampus, however, is crucial for encoding…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is generally associated with difficulties in contextual source memory but not single item memory. There are surprising inconsistencies in the literature, however, that the current study seeks to address by examining item and source memory in age and ability matched groups of 22 ASD and 21 comparison adults. Results…

The visual context in which an object or face resides can provide useful top-down information for guiding attention orienting, object recognition, and visual search. Although infants have demonstrated sensitivity to covariation in spatial arrays, it is presently unclear whether they can use rapidly acquired contextual knowledge to guide attention…

The microRNA miR-132 serves as a key regulator of a wide range of plasticity-associated processes in the central nervous system. Interestingly, miR-132 expression has also been shown to be under the control of the circadian timing system. This finding, coupled with work showing that miR-132 is expressed in the hippocampus, where it influences…

Stories have long been theorized to influence how we perceive our social world and our peers. Empirical research on this topic has begun to grow, with many studies exploring how stories and social cognition relate, across a range of different approaches. In order to structure past work and guide future investigations, this article presents a…

Background: Individuals with Down syndrome generally show a floor effect on Wechsler Scales that is manifested by flat profiles and with many or all of the weighted scores on the subtests equal to 1. Method: The main aim of the present paper is to use the statistical Hessl method and the extended statistical method of Orsini, Pezzuti and Hulbert…

Training "Aplysia" with inedible food for a period that is too brief to produce long-term memory becomes effective in producing memory when training is paired with a nitric oxide (NO) donor. Lip stimulation for the same period of time paired with an NO donor is ineffective. Using qPCR, we examined molecular correlates of brief training…

The brain has a high demand for energy, of which creatine (Cr) is an important regulator. Studies document neurocognitive benefits of oral Cr in mammals, yet little is known regarding their physiological basis. This study investigated the effects of Cr supplementation (3%, w/w) on hippocampal function in male C57BL/6 mice, including spatial…

Reward-prediction errors track the extent to which rewards deviate from expectations, and aid in learning. How do such errors in prediction interact with memory for the rewarding episode? Existing findings point to both cooperative and competitive interactions between learning and memory mechanisms. Here, we investigated whether learning about…

We have shown previously that male rats develop a conditioned ejaculatory preference (CEP) for females scented with a neutral odor like almond or lemon that is paired with the male's post-ejaculatory reward state during their first and subsequent early sexual experiences. However, preexposing males to the neutral odor alone prior to its pairing…

In contrast to a large body of work concerning the effects of physiological stress reactivity on children's socioemotional functioning, far less attention has been devoted to understanding the effects of such reactivity on cognitive, including mnemonic, functioning. How well children learn and remember information under stress has implications for…

Prolonged use of methamphetamine (meth) has been associated with episodic memory deficits in humans, and preclinical rat models of meth self-administration indicate the memory deficits are a consequence of meth use. Others have suggested that the meth-induced memory deficits may promote a cyclical pattern of drug use, abstinence, and relapse,…

Society can be obsessed with the concept of intelligence, according to the author. Parents want to know if their children are smart. Schools try to detect the intelligence of children so that they can separate them into "gifted and talented" programs on one end of the spectrum and remedial programs on the other. Employers want to know if…