In my life: memory, self and The Beatles.

In a large-scale study, we asked people for their memories of The Beatles. Over four thousand respondents completed an online questionnaire. The memory could be related to a song, album, event, TV, film, or even a personal encounter.

Fictional First Memories.

In a large-scale survey, 6,641 respondents provided descriptions of their first memory and their age when they encoded that memory, and they completed various memory judgments and ratings. In good agreement with many other studies, where mean age at encoding of earliest memories is usually found to fall somewhere in the first half of the 3rd year of life, the mean age at encoding here was 3.2 years.

Intentionally fabricated autobiographical memories.

Participants generated both autobiographical memories (AMs) that they believed to be true and intentionally fabricated autobiographical memories (IFAMs). Memories were constructed while a concurrent memory load (random 8-digit sequence) was held in mind or while there was no concurrent load. Amount and accuracy of recall of the concurrent memory load was reliably poorer following generation of IFAMs than following generation of AMs.

Amnesia and future thinking: Exploring the role of memory in the quantity and quality of episodic future thoughts.

Objectives: To examine the impact of memory accessibility on episodic future thinking.

Design: Single-case study of neurological patient HCM and an age-matched comparison group of neurologically Healthy Controls.

Methods: We administered a full battery of tests assessing general intelligence, memory, and executive functioning.

The effects of a distracting N-back task on recognition memory are reduced by negative emotional intensity.

Memory performance is usually impaired when participants have to encode information while performing a concurrent task. Recent studies using recall tasks have found that emotional items are more resistant to such cognitive depletion effects than non-emotional items. However, when recognition tasks are used, the same effect is more elusive as recent recognition studies have obtained contradictory results.

Semantics, syntax or neither? A case for resolution in the interpretation of N500 and P600 responses to harmonic incongruities.

The processing of notes and chords which are harmonically incongruous with their context has been shown to elicit two distinct late ERP effects. These effects strongly resemble two effects associated with the processing of linguistic incongruities: a P600, resembling a typical response to syntactic incongruities in language, and an N500, evocative of the N400, which is typically elicited in response to semantic incongruities in language. Despite the robustness of these two patterns in the musical incongruity literature, no consensus has yet been reached as to the reasons for the existence of two distinct responses to harmonic incongruities.

Adult recollections of childhood memories: What details can be recalled?

In a memory survey, adult respondents recalled, dated, and described two earliest positive and negative memories that they were highly confident were memories. They then answered a series of questions that focused on memory details such as clothing, duration, weather, and so on. Few differences were found between positive and negative memories, which on average had 4/5 details and dated to the age of 6/6.

Episodic intertrial learning of younger and older participants: effects of age of acquisition.

There is clear evidence of a deficit in episodic memory for older adults compared to younger adults. Using an intertrial technique previous research has investigated whether this deficit can be attributed to a decline in encoding or consolidation. On standard memory tests, these two aspects of memory function can be measured by examining the items forgotten or acquired across multiple learning trials.

Episodic future thinking: linking neuropsychological performance with episodic detail in young and old adults.

Episodic future thinking (EFT) has been linked with our ability to remember past events. However, its specific neurocognitive subprocesses have remained elusive. In Experiment 1, a study of healthy older adults was conducted to investigate the candidate subprocesses of EFT.

Mental time travel: effects of trial duration on episodic and semantic content.

Studies exploring mental time travel commonly use cue-word paradigms to elicit past and future autobiographical events. However, the effect of trial duration (how long participants are allowed to describe events) on the relationship between episodic and nonepisodic detail and episodic specificity (i.e.

True and intentionally fabricated memories.

The aim of the experiment reported here was to investigate the processes underlying the construction of truthful and deliberately fabricated memories. Properties of memories created to be intentionally false (fabricated memories) were compared to properties of memories believed to be true (true memories). Participants recalled and then wrote or spoke true memories and fabricated memories of everyday events.

Episodic intertrial learning of younger and older adults: effects of word frequency.

Older adults have a demonstrable episodic memory deficit. The present study aimed to investigate whether the age deficit in episodic memory was influenced by stimulus characteristics known to produce differences in memory performance in younger adults, specifically word frequency. An intertrial paradigm was used whereby participants studied high- or low-frequency lists over several study-test trials, and the loss and gain of individual items was measured across trials; putative measures of consolidation and encoding.

The role of age of acquisition in memory: effects on judgements of learning and recall.

Judgements of learning (JOLs) are self-made predictions of the likelihood that one will later recall information. The influence of stimulus characteristics on JOLs and recall continues to receive attention, yet there are still a number of unexplored lexical word features that may exert an effect on mnemonic processing. Using a standard cue-target paradigm, we focused on the role of word age of acquisition (AoA) and evaluated the role of both cue and target AoA on responses.

Norming the odd: creation, norming, and validation of a stimulus set for the study of incongruities across music and language.

Research into similarities between music and language processing is currently experiencing a strong renewed interest. Recent methodological advances have led to neuroimaging studies presenting striking similarities between neural patterns associated with the processing of music and language--notably, in the study of participants' responses to elements that are incongruous with their musical or linguistic context. Responding to a call for greater systematicity by leading researchers in the field of music and language psychology, this article describes the creation, selection, and validation of a set of auditory stimuli in which both congruence and resolution were manipulated in equivalent ways across harmony, rhythm, semantics, and syntax.

First words and first memories.

In two experiments autobiographical memories from childhood were recalled to cue words naming common objects, locations, activities and emotions. Participants recalled their earliest specific memory associated with each word and dated their age at the time of the remembered event. A striking and specific finding emerged: age of earliest memory was systematically later, by several months, than the age of acquisition of the word to which it was associated.

The relationship between excessive Internet use and depression: a questionnaire-based study of 1,319 young people and adults.

Background: There is a growing awareness of a psychiatric construct that needs to be better defined and understood: Internet addiction (IA). Recently there has been much public concern over the relationship between Internet use and negative affect. This study explored the concept of IA and examined the relationship between addictive symptoms and depression.

ApoE gene and familial risk of Alzheimer's disease as predictors of odour identification in older adults.

The study examined odour identification ability in healthy older adults at increased risk for developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). We recruited a sample (n = 24) of siblings related to probable AD cases and an age-matched control sample (n = 47). All participants were genotyped for the presence of the ApoE epsilon4 allele.

Interpret with caution: multicollinearity in multiple regression of cognitive data.

Shibihara and Kondo in 2002 reported a reanalysis of the 1997 Kanji picture-naming data of Yamazaki, Ellis, Morrison, and Lambon-Ralph in which independent variables were highly correlated. Their addition of the variable visual familiarity altered the previously reported pattern of results, indicating that visual familiarity, but not age of acquisition, was important in predicting Kanji naming speed. The present paper argues that caution should be taken when drawing conclusions from multiple regression analyses in which the independent variables are so highly correlated, as such multicollinearity can lead to unreliable output.

Age of acquisition, ageing, and verb production: normative and experimental data.

Young and old adults were shown pictured or written verbs and asked to name them as quickly as possible. Simultaneous multiple regression was used to investigate which of a set of potential variables predicted naming speed. Age of acquisition was found to be an important predictor of naming speed in both young and old adults, and for both word and picture naming.