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Memory is important in everyday life, forming the key to learning of many kinds. Leaming to speak, understanding language, recalling events experienced, telling stories and conversations rely on the cognitive operations of verbal processing and memory. Previous research has demonstrated that memory for prose can be facilitated by various means, such as by adding meaning to words by gesture, or by maintaining the context of leaming and recall.

Alcohol and study list repetition were used to manipulate encoding quality to gain insight into the mechanisms underlying false memories. The DRM paradigm (Deese 1959b; Roediger & McDermott 1995) was used to elicit false memories. Participants studied lists of words (veridical items) which were semantically related to a critical non-presented item, which, if erroneously endorsed, served as the measure of false memory. Implicit and explicit tests of memory were used, and remember know judgments were also taken. An anterograde impairment of memory after alcohol was obtained for veridical items using explicit tests, although no effect of alcohol was found using implicit measures. Alcohol reduced false memory levels relative to placebo for material viewed once at encoding. In accordance with previous en1pirical research, repetition was found to increase, decrease or have no effect on false memory levels. The introduction of distinctive pictorial stimuli at encoding resulted in an inverted U -shaped relationship between repetition and false memories, though this effect was confined to remember judgments only. The increase in false memories as a function of repetition was greater in the alcohol group than in the placebo group_ whilst the placebo group was better able to use extended repetitions to reduce false memories. These results are accounted for using the Activation and Monitoring Framework (Gallo & Roediger 2002). It is suggested that reduced levels of false memories under alcohol for material viewed once can be attributed to reduced activation within semantic networks resulting from superficial encoding under alcohol (Craik 1977) and impoverished attentional resources when intoxicated (Steele & Josephs 1988). The selective impairment of recollective traces under alcohol (Duka et al. 2001) may limit the potential for extended repetitions to diminish false memories under alcohol. The role of metacognitive factors in affecting false memory endorsement is also discussed.

It is increasingly recognised that, in adulthood, attentional control plays an important role in optimising the ability to encode and maintain items in visual short-term memory (VSTM). Memory capacity limits increase dramatically over childhood, but the mechanisms through which children guide attention to maximise VSTM remain poorly understood. Through a number of experiments manipulating different parameters, the current thesis aimed to explore the developmental trajectories of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying selective attention within VSTM and to examine whether variations in attentional control are accompanied by individual differences in VSTM capacity. Chapters 2 and 3 investigated the development of attentional orienting in preparation for encoding and during maintenance. Younger children emerged as less able than older children and adults to orient attention to internally held representations. Therefore, Chapter 4 tested whether younger children’s attentional orienting is differentially affected by memory load. While attentional orienting prior to encoding was more beneficial when required to remember a greater number of items, cueing benefits during maintenance were similar across load conditions. Chapter 5 investigated whether temporal parameters influence younger children’s variable ability to orient attention during maintenance. Attentional orienting operated more efficiently on transient iconic traces rather than on VSTM representations due to passive decay of the memory traces as a function of time. Chapter 6 assessed whether the characteristics of the memoranda constrain the efficiency of attentional orienting within VSTM. Attentional orienting supported differentially the maintenance of familiar and meaningless items and pinpointed the quantitative improvement of mnemonic strategies over development. Finally, Chapter 7 examined the temporal dynamics of prospective and retrospective orienting of attention in VSTM. Children deployed neural pathways underpinning attentional orienting less efficiently than adults and differentially across the two orienting conditions suggesting their neural dissociation. Overall, findings from the current thesis define how children develop the ability to deploy attentional control in service of VSTM.