The topic of co-witness discussions has become an important focus in eyewitness research due to the acknowledgment that these discussions can lead to transfers of misinformation. One person's memory of an event can influence that of another in a process often referred to as "memory conformity". The aim of this thesis was to try to fill some of the gaps in the memory conformity literature.

In the achievement motivation literature (Elliot, 1999), motivational foci are thought to create different perceptual-cognitive frameworks which guide behaviour when in an achievement situation. The goals of mastery-approach (development of self-referential competence) and performance-approach (demonstration of normative competence) have been found to exert different effects on various outcomes. Relatively less research has examined the cognitive processes through which these effects might operate. The current thesis aims to contribute to the motivation-cognition interface by presenting a series of studies designed to examine the role of working memory in experimentally induced mastery-approach and performance-approach goal pursuit. In study 1, a meta-analysis is presented with the objective of identifying an effective method of manipulating, and conducting manipulation checks of, achievement goals in the current thesis. Results confirm that study design features influence observed achievement goal effects. In study 2, a preliminary investigation of the impact of achievement goals on working memory, across load, was conducted. Under high load, performance-approach goal pursuit resulted in poorer working memory processing than mastery-approach goal pursuit or a no-goal control. In study 3 and 4, dual task methodology was used to measure the working memory resource requirements of achievement goal pursuit. Results show that when working memory is loaded, those pursuing mastery-approach goals experience larger performance decrements than those pursuing performance-approach goals. Finally in study 5, it was predicted that if achievement goals differentially engage working memory this would reflect in differences in gross measures of performance and task strategies on a category-learning task. These predictions weren't supported. It was however found that trait goal orientation and self-reported state achievement goals shared distinct patterns of relations to category-learning according to the pattern of predictions outlined for their manipulated equivalents. It is concluded that mastery-approach goal pursuit relies on the availability of working memory more than performance-approach.

Semantic memory refers to our knowledge of words, objects and concepts without requiring relevance to any particular personal experience or episode. Studies of semantic processing and cortical atrophy in semantic dementia patients have revealed that relatively focal tissue loss in the anterior temporal lobes results in profound loss of semantic knowledge across sensory modalities and object categories. Such studies have therefore implied that the temporal lobes, especially the anterior regions, play a crucial role in semantic memory.

No description available.

Despite continued interest in the capacity limitations of Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM), there is uncertainty as to how these limited resources are distributed: among a limited number of high resolution slots or flexibly according to task demands. This thesis extends current knowledge by exploring how top-down and perceptual mechanisms affect VSTM capacity. The General Introduction describes the current understanding and investigation of capacity limits. This appraisal extends into Chapter 2, which focuses on the specific behavioural, psychometric, and electrophysiological approaches taken in this thesis to estimate effects on the precision and probability of recall of VSTM representations. Most experiments used a change-detection task that parametrically varied the precision of the VSTM representations required for accurate responses. Chapter 3 presents an event- related potential (ERP) study involving a pre-cue, which enabled a shift of spatial attention in anticipation of an upcoming memory array. ERP signatures of anticipatory spatial attention predicted behavioural cueing benefits. As a complement, the study in Chapter 4 involved orienting attention to items already in VSTM. Results from both chapters suggest that attention affects the probability of recall rather than the precision of representations. Chapter 5 describes four experiments exploring the ability to trade the number versus precision of representations in VSTM according to task goals. No flexibility was found in setting this trade-off, suggesting that the balance between number and precision is mainly determined by stimulus driven factors. Experiments in Chapter 6 investigate whether and how competitive dynamics that characterise perceptual processing continue to influence VSTM representations. Competition among item features that were orthogonal to the task relevant features continued to influence performance. Perceptual differences between the conditions cannot account for this effect. Competitive effects were consistent across spatial and non-spatial dimensions. The General Discussion synthesises all results and highlights opportunities for future research.

No description available.

This thesis examines the ways in which an acute, social dose of alcohol affects the evaluation and encoding of emotionally significant events. The effects of the drug were examined in relation to both pleasant and unpleasant stimuli, compared with neutral. Chapter I presents a review of the literature relating to alcohol consumption and abuse, the pharmacology of alcohol, and established effects of alcohol and other drugs on memory and mood. It considers the dimensions and neurobiological substrates of emotional learning and memory and assesses state-dependent and mood-congruent effects on memory, drug-free and under alcohol. It was proposed that the well established retrograde facilitative and anterograde impairing effects of alcohol on neutral materials would also be found with emotional stimuli. As a result of the positive mood induced by alcohol, it was hypothesised that recall of positive stimuli would be facilitated through congruency effects, while recall of negatives would be impaired. Chapter 2 sets out the common methodology used in all this thesis' experiments, including the selection of the emotional visual stimuli. In chapters 3-8, the different experimental manipulations used to test the core hypotheses are considered, including a depth of processing manipulation (chapter 5) and mood induction (chapter 8). Chapter 9 considers post hoc the role of previous drinking history on memory performance across the six experiments. In chapter 10, the results from the six experimental chapters are discussed. It was concluded that the retrograde facilitative and anterograde impairing effects of alcohol are profound and relatively easy to demonstrate, while the dissociation of positive from negative recall is subtle and difficult to find using the dose deployed in this thesis. In order to detect mood congruency effects between the drug and pleasant visual stimuli, modelling the experience of emotionally significant events under alcohol in the laboratory requires the induction of a veridical mood state and not simply exposure to the stimuli

Understanding human cognition requires the characterisation of the limitations that our processing capacities are subject to. Such questions have been central to the examination of two key constructs in cognitive psychology: Working Memory (WM) and attention. In the domain of WM, recent models have posited a focus of attention, analogous to selective attention in perception, in which a single item is prioritised over others for cognitive operations. In nine experiments, this thesis explores the nature of the focus of attention in spatial WM in two regards. First, I used eye movements and reaction times to examine how priority is allocated to internal representations (Experiments 1-4). The results of these experiments indicated that orienting in WM could be decomposed into processes analogous to perceptual attention orienting. Through this, I was able to characterise three contributions to the switch cost: a) a process of cue evaluation; b) the process of orienting between objects; and c) interference between locations arising from attention shifts. Subsequently, I observed neurophysiological correlates of the first and third of these contributions in event-related potentials (Experiment 5). Second, building upon an increasing amount of evidence indicating an overlap between perception and WM, I sought to examine whether analogous processes of selection in both domains reflect a common mechanism (Experiments 6-9). Specifically, I examined whether the selection of an object in spatial WM was dependent on mechanisms underlying perceptual processing. The findings from these experiments indicated that selection in WM interacts with perceptual attention shifts, but is not dependent upon them. Overall, this thesis provides an account of how selection in WM is related to perceptual attention, and critically, how they are distinct. I account for these findings in a framework which specifies distinct representations for perception and WM, but in which they interact through a shared representation of attentional priority.

Personal Information Management (PIM) describes the processes by which an individual acquires, organises, and re-finds information. Studies have shown that people find PIM challenging and many struggle to manage the volume and diversity of information that they accumulate.

This thesis looked to answer the current discrepancies in the literature surrounding the involvement of attention in the emotional enhancement of memory effect (EEM). An initial exploration of the research areas of emotion, memory and attention is made. This informed a series of recommendations for the current study series. Using a succession of divided attention experiments, an EEM effect was found for negative images over neutral images in both full and divided attention conditions across all experiments. Despite current literature concluding similar results as evidence for the lack of attentiona! involvement in the EEM effect, the current thesis used regression based mediation analyses to uncover the potential hidden involvement of attention. Consistently a significant partial mediation of emotion's impact on memory via attention was found. These results were complemented by an ERP investigation which demonstrated traditional emotional memory ERP effects such as the emotional enhancement of the subsequent memory effect under both full and divided attention conditions during encoding phases. These findings are explored in relation to the current literature base investigating the possible involvement of attention in the EEM effect, and the wider emotion and memory research field. Discussion is made of other potential mediators in the EEM effect, the value of the EEM for survival, and suggestions are made for further empirical work of emotional memory formation .