Background: The relationship between average alcohol consumption and heart disease is well researched, showing a substantial cardioprotective association. This dissertation examined the epidemiological evidence for an effect of heavy episodic drinking (HED) over and above the effect of average alcohol consumption on heart disease. Methods: Electronic databases were systematically searched for epidemiological studies on the effect of HED on heart disease and identified articles were quantitatively summarized in a meta-analysis. Meta-regression models were used to examine the effect of characteristics of primary studies. Using individual-level data, semi-parametric Cox regression models were used to investigate HED exposure within narrow categories of average alcohol consumption in a US national population sample (n = 9,937) in relation to heart disease mortality in an 11-22 year follow-up. Frequency of heavy drinking episodes was used to identify latent classes of drinking history using growth mixture modeling in a sub-sample of this US cohort. Retrieved classes were used as independent variables in Cox regression models with heart disease mortality as the outcome event. Results: A pooled relative risk of 1.45 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.24-1.70) for HED compared with non-HED drinkers with average alcohol consumption between 0.1-60 g/day was derived in a meta-analysis. A strong and consistent association with HED was found among current drinkers consuming an average of 1-2 drinks per day in the US cohort. There was no evidence of increased heart disease mortality resulting from the frequency of heavy drinking episodes before the age of forty. Conclusions: There is reasonable and consistent evidence for an association of HED and heart disease in current drinkers, negating any beneficial effect from alcohol consumption on heart health. History of frequency of heavy drinking episodes, however, showed no evidence for such an effect modification.

Recent research has revealed many similarities between episodic memory, scene construction, and imagination of the future. It has been suggested that scene construction is the common process underlying memory and imagination, but no study to date has directly compared all three abilities. The present study compared retrieval time, ratings of detail and vividness for episodic memories, remembered scenes and imagined future events cued by landmarks of high and low familiarity. Memories, scenes, and imagined episodes based on a more familiar landmark as a cue were more quickly retrieved, more detailed, and more vivid. This study was the first to demonstrate the effects of frequent encounters with a cue on memory, scene construction and imagination of the future. Additionally, consistent results across conditions, as well as stronger effects in the scene construction condition, provide further evidence of a possible interdependence of episodic memory, imagination of the future, and scene construction.

Recent research has revealed many similarities between episodic memory, scene construction, and imagination of the future. It has been suggested that scene construction is the common process underlying memory and imagination, but no study to date has directly compared all three abilities. The present study compared retrieval time, ratings of detail and vividness for episodic memories, remembered scenes and imagined future events cued by landmarks of high and low familiarity. Memories, scenes, and imagined episodes based on a more familiar landmark as a cue were more quickly retrieved, more detailed, and more vivid. This study was the first to demonstrate the effects of frequent encounters with a cue on memory, scene construction and imagination of the future. Additionally, consistent results across conditions, as well as stronger effects in the scene construction condition, provide further evidence of a possible interdependence of episodic memory, imagination of the future, and scene construction.

Consider a common social interaction: Two people must each attend to and remember the other person’s behaviour while also keeping track of their own responses. Knowledge of what one said to whom is important for subsequent interactions so that information is not repeated to the same person. Remembering what one said to others is also important in the workplace where supervisors need to remember to whom they have told specific information so that they can later assess assignment progress from the relevant employee. The processes involved in remembering the destination of information will be referred to as “destination memory” in this dissertation. Although there has been extensive research regarding the processes involved in remembering the source of information, or “source memory,” there has been little to no research on destination memory. In a series of four experiments, this dissertation delineates the core features of destination memory. In Experiment 1, a paradigm was developed to assess destination memory in the laboratory. This experiment also corroborated complaints of destination memory failures: Adults have very poor destination memory when compared to memory for the information they tell or the person to whom they tell the information. Destination memory fundamentally differs from source memory in terms of how information is transferred—“input” in the case of source memory and “output” in the case of destination memory. Attention is directed at the processes involved in transmitting information in the case of destination memory which leaves fewer attention resources for associating the information with the person one is telling it to. Therefore, it would be anticipated that destination memory would be worse than source memory. Experiment 2 directly contrasted destination memory and source memory and confirmed that destination memory accuracy was indeed substantially lower than source memory accuracy. Because in the case of a destination event information is self-produced, attention is focused on oneself. Experiment 3 assessed whether self-focus reduces the association between the outputted information and the person that one is telling it to. When self-focus increased, so too did destination memory errors because fewer attentional resources were available to integrate the person-information pairing. This led to the prediction that, in the reverse situation where attentional resources are directed to the person-information pairing at encoding, then destination memory should improve. Experiment 4 confirmed this prediction: Destination memory was enhanced when people’s attention was shifted from themselves to the person-information pairing. This thesis has undertaken to examine a surprisingly neglected component of normal remembering—remembering who one told something to. To study this “destination memory,” a new paradigm is introduced. Across four experiments, destination memory is seen to be quite fallible, more so than source memory. An account is offered in terms of destination memory being undermined by the self-focus that it generates. This view is reinforced by two experiments that show that increasing self-focus reduces destination memory whereas increasing environment-focus improves destination memory. Like source memory, destination memory is a key component of episodic memory, the record of our personal past.

Consider a common social interaction: Two people must each attend to and remember the other person’s behaviour while also keeping track of their own responses. Knowledge of what one said to whom is important for subsequent interactions so that information is not repeated to the same person. Remembering what one said to others is also important in the workplace where supervisors need to remember to whom they have told specific information so that they can later assess assignment progress from the relevant employee. The processes involved in remembering the destination of information will be referred to as “destination memory” in this dissertation. Although there has been extensive research regarding the processes involved in remembering the source of information, or “source memory,” there has been little to no research on destination memory. In a series of four experiments, this dissertation delineates the core features of destination memory. In Experiment 1, a paradigm was developed to assess destination memory in the laboratory. This experiment also corroborated complaints of destination memory failures: Adults have very poor destination memory when compared to memory for the information they tell or the person to whom they tell the information. Destination memory fundamentally differs from source memory in terms of how information is transferred—“input” in the case of source memory and “output” in the case of destination memory. Attention is directed at the processes involved in transmitting information in the case of destination memory which leaves fewer attention resources for associating the information with the person one is telling it to. Therefore, it would be anticipated that destination memory would be worse than source memory. Experiment 2 directly contrasted destination memory and source memory and confirmed that destination memory accuracy was indeed substantially lower than source memory accuracy. Because in the case of a destination event information is self-produced, attention is focused on oneself. Experiment 3 assessed whether self-focus reduces the association between the outputted information and the person that one is telling it to. When self-focus increased, so too did destination memory errors because fewer attentional resources were available to integrate the person-information pairing. This led to the prediction that, in the reverse situation where attentional resources are directed to the person-information pairing at encoding, then destination memory should improve. Experiment 4 confirmed this prediction: Destination memory was enhanced when people’s attention was shifted from themselves to the person-information pairing. This thesis has undertaken to examine a surprisingly neglected component of normal remembering—remembering who one told something to. To study this “destination memory,” a new paradigm is introduced. Across four experiments, destination memory is seen to be quite fallible, more so than source memory. An account is offered in terms of destination memory being undermined by the self-focus that it generates. This view is reinforced by two experiments that show that increasing self-focus reduces destination memory whereas increasing environment-focus improves destination memory. Like source memory, destination memory is a key component of episodic memory, the record of our personal past.

Knowledge management is an important weapon for business competition. Many organizations are adopting knowledge management systems. For knowledge management, document management is its key foundation. There is a large amount of procedural knowledge existing in decision documents. This knowledge can illustrate the process and considerations in a decision situation, called episodic. The episodic knowledge can help decision makers understand historical decision process and considerations for future decision making. Therefore, how to discover decision episodes from existing documents is a major research issue in knowledge management. This research proposes a method for episode mining that integrates automatic document summary techniques, knowledge ontology, and index structures to build the relations and processes of events, and use the Gantt Chart and Flow Chart to portray event processes. We build a prototype system and use a news event as our example to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach and demonstrate the results.

Sedimentation rates in sediment cores from Lavaca Bay have been high within the last 1-2 decays within the central portion of the bay, with small fluctuations from river input. Lavaca Bay is a broad, flat, and shallow (<3 m) microtidal estuary within the upper Matagorda Bay system. Marine derived sediment enters the system from Matagorda Bay, while two major rivers (Lavaca & Navidad) supply the majority of terrestrially derived sediment. With continuous sediment supply the bay showed no bathymetric change until the introduction of the shipping channel. Processes that potentially lead to sediment transport and resuspension within the bay include wind driven wave resuspension, storm surges, wind driven blowouts, and river flooding. These processes were assessed using X-radiographs, grain size profiles, and 210Pb and 137Cs geochronology of sediment diver cores. In six cores the upper 10 cm of the seabed has been physically mixed, where as the rest showed a continuous sediment accumulation rate between 0.84-1.22 cm/yr. Sidescan sonar and subbottom chirp sonar data coupled with sedimentological core and grab samples were used to map the location and delineate the sedimentary facies within the estuarine system in depths >1 m. Five sedimentary facies were identified in Lavaca Bay and adjacent bays, they are: 1) estuarine mud; 2) fluvial sand; 3) beach sand; 4) bay mouth sand; and 5) oyster biofacies. Of the five facies, Lavaca Bay consists primarily of estuarine mud (68%). Pre-Hurricane and post-Hurricane Claudette cores were obtained to observe the impact to the sedimentary processes. The north and south Lavaca Bay were eroded by 10 cm and 2-3 cm, respectively. Cox Bay and Keller Bay saw a net deposition of 2-3 cm.

While episodic and spatial memory both depend on the hippocampus, opposite gender differences in these functions suggest they are partly separate, with different neural underpinnings. The anterior and posterior hippocampus differ  in structure and whole-brain connectivity, and studies point to the posterior hippocampus being more involved in spatial memory while the anterior hippocampus’ role in episodic memory is less clear. This thesis aims to explore the role of the anterior and posterior hippocampus, and associated brain regions, in episodic and spatial memory. Paper I studied gender differences in hippocampal activation underlying differences in spatial memory performance. Better performance in men was accompanied by greater right-lateralization of hippocampal activation compared to women. Paper II investigated regions of gray matter that covaried in volume with the anterior and posterior hippocampus, and whether these covariance patterns depended on gender and were related to behavior. The anterior and posterior hippocampus showed different patterns of covariance, with the anterior hippocampus covariance pattern observed in women and the posterior hippocampus covariance pattern primarily in men. Paper III considered whether the location of hippocampal recruitment in episodic memory depends on memory content. Verbal stimuli were associated with more anterior, and left-lateralized, encoding activations than pictorial stimuli, which in turn were associated with more posterior and bilateral encoding activations. This was not observed during retrieval. Paper IV investigated whether resting-state connectivity associated with the anterior and posterior hippocampus predicts episodic and spatial memory performance, respectively. Resting-state connectivity associated with the anterior, not posterior, hippocampus predicted episodic memory performance, while resting-state connectivity associated with the posterior, not anterior, hippocampus predicted spatial memory performance. This thesis lends further support to differences in function and structure between the anterior and posterior hippocampus suggesting that these two sub–segments play different roles in episodic and spatial memory. Further, it suggests that gender differences in anterior and posterior hippocampus function underlies gender differences in episodic and spatial memory, respectively. Considering the anterior and posterior hippocampus, as well as men and women, separately, is hence important when studying the effect of age and pathology on the hippocampus and associated memory functions.

<p>The ability to re-experience the past is a defining feature of episodic memory. Yet we know that even the most detailed memories are distinct from the initial experiences to which they refer. This relationship between the initial encoding and subsequent retrieval of information is central to our understanding of memory and its capacity to connect us to the past. Past research has shown that neural signatures present during perception are reactivated during later memory, but the correspondence between this reactivation and various aspects of memory function remains unclear. This dissertation attempts to connect behavioral measures of memory to the reinstatement and modification of neural information that takes place when memories are retrieved. In the first two studies reported, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to assess event-specific cortical patterns from encoding that are reinstated during retrieval (encoding-retrieval similarity, ERS). Increases in this fine-grained of reinstatement are found in occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) during detailed memory for scenes (Study 1), and in the medial temporal lobes (MTL) for the recovery of relational information (Study 2). In addition to reflecting encoding-related content, retrieval is also found to strengthen previously encoded information via hippocampally-mediated mechanisms in Study 3. Together, these studies demonstrate the detailed nature of information that is recovered across varying degrees of memory and show how retrieval can also alter stored representations, emphasizing the interactive nature of memory processes.</p> / Dissertation

Successful recognition memory decisions depend on mnemonic and decision making processes that are computed by multiple, distributed brain areas. However, little is known about what computations these areas perform or how these areas are connected. Here, I collected behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging data from humans during the performance of an old-new recognition memory task with retrospective confidence judgments. Across runs, choice bias was successfully manipulated by providing rewards for correct responses that were either symmetric (equal reward for hits and correct rejections) or asymmetric (one response worth more than the other). Successful recognition memory was associated with activation in anterior prefrontal, parahippocampal, posterior cingulate, and parietal cortex. Resting state functional connectivity demonstrated that these brain areas are organized into two distinct networks. The first network includes parahippocampal cortex and angular gyrus. The second network includes lateral prefrontal cortex and intraparietal sulcus. The hippocampal-cortical network was most active during old vs. new decisions, did not differentiate hits from false alarms, and was differentially active during low confidence old and new judgments. In contrast, while the frontoparietal network was robustly activated by hits, it was not activated during either false alarms or low confidence old judgments. Thus, these two distinct networks can be distinguished by their relative connectivity to the medial temporal lobe vs. lateral prefrontal cortex and their responses during uncertain old judgments and errors. The choice bias manipulation had opposing effects on the parietal components of these networks, which further suggests these networks make distinct contributions to mnemonic decision making. / Psychology