This study analyzed the memory retention of University of Kentucky Dietetic and Hospitality students as it relates to food safety and sanitation knowledge originally presented on the ServSafe® certification exam. Dietetic and hospitality students take the ServSafe® certification course during the sophomore year of their degree program, but they are responsible for the sanitation and food safety information throughout their entire program of undergraduate study. The final sample consisted of 25 participants, with 84% (n=21) in the Dietetics program and 16% (n=4) in the Hospitality, Management and Tourism program. The mean difference in total score, domain one, domain two, domain three, domain four and domain five were statistically significant with a p-value <0.05. Domain three was the domain students recalled the most with a difference of 16.52%. Domains four and five were recalled least by students with a difference of 35.8% and 35.65%. The information found in this study can be used in the Department of Dietetic and Human Nutrition (DHN) and the Department of Hospitality, Management and Tourism (HMT) to enhance the food sanitation knowledge of students throughout their courses.

Experimental evidence was needed to help answer the question of whether the decrease in retention from Trial 1 to Trial 2 was caused by PI from Trial 1 decreasing retention of Trial 2, or by a primacy effect increasing retention of Trial 1 over the natural retention baseline of a S. The present experiment was designed to help answer this question.

The use of avatars in education is becoming increasingly common, but research on their impact on learning and trust remains limited. This study investigates the perceived trust in a highly anthropomorphic AI-generated avatar in educational contexts and how it affects learning. We examined how awareness (informed group, n = 29) of the presenter in an educational video being an avatar affected learning compared to an uninformed group (n = 29), employing a mixed methods design (quantitative and qualitative). The groups were compared on (1) memory performance of the educational content (multiple-choice questions), (2) perceived trust of the avatar (Likert scale questions), and (3) emotional reactions (open-ended questions). The results revealed a significant group difference, the informed group performed lower in the memory test (U = 278.000 p = 0.026), but no significant group difference in perceived trust was shown, with both groups' responses being neutral or positive. However, the informed group exhibited a significantly less positive attitude toward receiving future educational content from avatars. The findings are discussed in relation to theories of implicit biases and divided attention, which may explain the lower scores within the informed group. The qualitative phase further enriched these results, indicating that awareness of the AI nature of the avatar led to more critical engagement with the content, potentially impeding learning. Future research should explore the roles of divided attention and implicit biases to better understand the conditions under which avatars impede learning.

During medical school students must learn and retain a large volume of information that is important for success in their future career as physicians. Laboratory studies have given insight into the mechanisms underpinning learning and memory, but few studies have examined the time course of memorial retention in a real world setting. The current study aimed to examine the memorial mechanisms used to retain information over time by using a variation of the Remember/Know/New recognition memory procedure to examine memory retention for anatomical information in first year medical students. Participants were presented with anatomical terms and asked to respond whether they Can Define the term, were Familiar with the term or Don’t Know the term. Participants’ Remember and Know responses are thought to be reflective of different processes, recollection and familiarity, respectively. We were particularly interested in examining differences in memorial retention based on retention interval (immediately at course end and after six months). All participants were enrolled in a Medical Gross Anatomy course. The course was divided into three successive modules, each of which culminated in an examination, module 1: Back and Limbs, module 2: Thorax, Abdomen and Pelvis, and module 3: Head and Neck. Participants completed a computer based memory task at three separate time points: prior to course start (session 1), after course completion (session 2); and six months after course completion (session 3). Students were presented with anatomical terms from each module and asked to respond whether they Can Define, are Familiar with or Don’t Know a term. We predicted that responses would differ depending on when the module of the course was taught and when the testing occurred. Following work on primacy and recency, we predicted that at session 2 students would make the most Can Define responses to information learned most recently. We predicted that the second most Can Define responses would be to information learned the longest period of time from the testing session, and that information learned in the middle would be least well recalled (lowest number of Can Define responses). Furthermore, we predicted that familiarity responses would show the reverse pattern to Can Define responses at session 2.We also predicted that performance would differ by session. We hypothesized that the proportion of Can Define responses would be higher for session 2 relative to session 3, due to the processes of forgetting. Furthermore, we predicted that recollective processes characterized by Can Define responses, would be most common in module 3, the module most recently studied relative to session 2. Lastly, we predicted that the number of Familiar responses would increase across the two sessions. Our results showed that responses varied based on when the information was taught in that participants made more Can Define responses to recently learned module 3 and earliest learned module 1 relative to module 2. Responses also varied by session, as the number of Familiar responses increased overall across session 2 and 3. At session 3, there were no significant differences in the proportion of Can Define or Familiar responses between the different modules of the course. Theoretically, these results suggest that while the order of teaching impacts performance at course end, in the longer-term order of teaching ceases to matter and level of forgetting plateaus across modules. Practically however, a teacher’s aim is to maximize retention. Students might benefit from interleaving of course content instead of separate blocks, so that no one module is taught in the middle and more frequent testing to boost overall retention.

A short wakeful rest immediately after new learning boosts verbal memory retention over several minutes. This memory boost is observed both in healthy people and in patients with amnesia, including patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and mild Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Wakeful resting is hypothesized to boost memory by protecting the memory consolidation (strengthening) process from interfering sensory stimulation. The effect of a short wakeful rest immediately after new learning has, to this stage, been tested only over standard retention intervals (≤1 hour). The objectives of this PhD project were to: 1.) examine whether a short wakeful rest immediately after learning boosts memory over a longer retention interval (7 days) in healthy older adults (Experiment 1, Experiment 2) and aMCI/mild AD patients (Experiment 3) 2.) investigate whether intentional rehearsal is necessary and sufficient to boost memory during wakeful rest, over both short-term (15-minute) and long-term (7-day) delays (Experiment 4, 5 and 6) 3.) compare the effect of a short post-learning rest on retention as assessed via cued recall, free recall and recognition, both over short delays (15 minutes) and long delays (7 days and 4 weeks) (Experiments 4,5 and 7) 4.) examine whether a short wakeful rest immediately after learning boosts retention of real-life-like stimuli (face/name paired associates) in healthy older adults and aMCI/mild AD patients (Experiment 8, Experiment 9) In order to accomplish these aims, several samples of healthy adults and amnesic patients were tested, utilising a range of experimental designs. In all experiments, the learning of new material was followed immediately (i) by a brief wakeful rest, or (ii) by a cognitively demanding task. A delayed memory test took place after a range of intervals. The results demonstrate a pronounced memory enhancement over 15-30 minutes and 7 days in aMCI/mild AD patients via a short post-learning wakeful rest. A similar, albeit less pronounced 7-day memory benefit via post-learning wakeful rest was found in healthy older adults. Moreover, it was found that post-learning wakeful resting boosted 7-day recognition memory in healthy older adults, even when the learned material could not be rehearsed intentionally. Although intentional rehearsal did provide a 7-day memory improvement in healthy older adults, the present results indicate that it is not necessary in order to enhance long-term recognition memory via wakeful resting. The long-lived memory benefit gained via post-learning wakeful rest was shown to last at least 4 weeks in healthy adults, and free recall tests were more sensitive to the post-learning delay manipulation than cued recall tests. Finally, healthy controls and aMCI/mild AD patients who were able to learn face/name pairs showed enhanced 30-minute retention of these stimuli following wakeful rest conditions. The present findings demonstrate that both clinical and non-clinical populations are able to retain more new information over long periods, if the time interval immediately after new learning is devoid of further sensory stimulation. These results contribute to a growing body of literature stipulating that minimizing sensory stimulation frees early memory consolidation resources, allowing for superior offline consolidation of verbal material over a standard (≤1 hour) interval. The findings of this thesis extend this hypothesis over (i) a longer interval and (ii) to real-life-like stimuli, and these results are examined in light of memory consolidation theory. Implications of the premise of retroactive interference as a mechanism of longer-term forgetting are discussed.

This thesis investigated the testing effect, which is the tendency of testing to enhance learning and memory retention. Specifically, the thesis examines the extent to which test-induced retention benefits extend to the questions as well as the answers; are these benefits symmetrical? The results in the laboratory experiment (Experiment 1) demonstrated that the symmetry in retention benefits is highly dependent on the accuracy in the initial test. For the items students answered correctly in the initial test, the retention benefit was found to be symmetrical across the questions and answers supporting the retrieval hypothesis of the testing effect. However, for initially incorrect items, the retention performance was substantially better for the questions than the answers suggesting an asymmetrical effect from testing, a result that is also consistent with the retrieval hypothesis. These results were replicated using educationally-relevant materials with a delay up to five and a half months in two hybrid studies combining actual classroom experiences with controlled assessments in the laboratory (Experiment 2A & 2B). A series of follow-up studies were conducted to examine the difference in retention performance of the questions and the answers for the initial incorrect items. Particularly, the experiments focused on investigating various factors that might contribute to or eliminate the difference in retention performance, including prior study (Experiment 3), verification feedback (Experiment 4A & 4B) and answer feedback (Experiment 5). The thesis also touched upon various issues related to the temporal dimension of the testing effect. The previous notion that testing slows down forgetting rate is not supported by the data. Instead, testing seems to provide a short-term insulation against immediate forgetting, but then memory for the tested materials decays in the same way as the non-tested materials.

Interleaved effects are widely documented. Research demonstrates that interleaved presentation orders, as opposed to blocked orders typically benefit inductive category learning. What drives interleaved effects is less straightforward. Interleaved presentations provide both the opportunity to compare and contrast between different types of category exemplars, which are temporally juxtaposed, and the opportunity to space study of the same type of category exemplars, which are temporally separated within the presentation span. Accordingly, interleaved effects might be driven by enhanced discrimination, enhanced memory retention, or both in some measure. Though recent studies have largely endorsed enhanced discrimination as the critical mechanism driving interleaved effects, there is no strong evidence to controvert the contribution of enhanced memory retention for interleaved effects. I further examined the role of memory retention by manipulating both presentation order and category structure. Across two experiments I found that memory retention may drive interleaved effects in categorization tasks.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are variants of Neural Networks that are able to learn temporal relationships between sequences presented to the neural network. RNNs are often employed to learn underlying relationships in time series and sequential data. This dissertation examines the extent of RNN’s memory retention and how it is influenced by different activation functions, network structures and recurrent network types. To investigate memory retention, three approaches (and variants thereof) are used. First the number of patterns each network is able to retain is measured. Thereafter the length of retention is investigated. Lastly the previous experiments are combined to measure the retention of patterns over time. During each investigation, the effect of using different activation functions and network structures are considered to determine the configurations’ effect on memory retention. The dissertation concludes that memory retention of a network is not necessarily improved when adding more parameters to a network. Activation functions have a large effect on the performance of RNNs when retaining patterns, especially temporal patterns. Deeper network structures have the trade-off of less memory retention per parameter in favour of the ability to model more complex relationships. / Dissertation (MSc (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Computer Science / MSc (Computer Science) / Unrestricted

The mucus-dwelling bacteria previously isolated from the surface of a freshwater fish species (Alburnus alburnus from Lake Mogan, Ankara), were studied to discover their cobalt resistance. The minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) were determined for a total of thirty six bacterial isolates. The results of the resistance studies led us to design experiments on adaptation to cobalt and subsequent memory retention. Three selected isolates were exposed to an inhibitory cobalt concentration as a mixed culture and individually. The delayed formation of colonies along with competitive exclusion of one of the isolates in the mixed culture were recorded. The delay for colony formation was followed up for liquid culture conditions. After some of our isolates acclimated to cobalt and started to exhibit constant time of growth period, it is assumed that they were adapted. We regarded adaptation as a result of memory formation. Next, we did a further study to find out how long this memory could be retained via serial multiple passages in cobalt free medium. We expressed our observations quantitatively by measuring the growth by using spectrophotometer and by performing viable counts. Interestingly, where there was a high CFU, the photometric values were very low. We interpreted the finding such that the presence of cobalt above tolerance limits were causing size reduction in the cells. So that their presence was underestimated by optic devices in visible range. Our study hinted that freshwater bacteria was adapting cobalt in a memory based mechanism and able to retain this memory for some time.

I den föreliggande studien undersöktes mobilljudens effekt på minnesbehållning i klassrumsmiljö. I Studien undersöktes även vilken teori – unitary teorin eller duplex-mekanism teorin – som lämpligast förklarade mobilljudens eventuella effekter på kognitiva mekanismer. Metoden bestod i att deltagarna tittade på en kort dokumentär och därefter utförde ett minnestest, som berörde dokumentärens innehåll. Experimentgruppen fick titta på dokumentären, samtidigt som ringsignaler och aviseringsljud spelades upp under fyra perioder i dokumentären, medan kontrollgruppen inte utsattes FÖR buller. Deltagarnas hågkomst av innehållet av dessa fyra perioder prövades genom testfrågor. 27 försökspersoner deltog i experimentet, varav 11 personer var i kontrollgruppen och resten i experimentgruppen. Resultatet visade inte någon effekt av mobilljud på deltagarnas minnesbehållning. Resultatet stödjer dock duplex-mekanism teorin, vilket betyder att unitary teorin inte stöds i den föreliggande studien. Däremot, försvårar metodologiska brister och lågt antal deltagare tolkningen av resultatet. Förslag för framtida forskning inbegriper metodologiska förbättringar och undersökningsområden. / The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of cell phone noise on memory retention in classroom environment. A second purpose of the study was to determine which theory – unitary account or duplex-mechanism account – would best explain the effect of cell phone noise on cognitive mechanisms. The method required the participants to watch a short documentary and afterwards complete a memory test, consisting of gist questions. The experiment group was simultaneously being exposed to ringtones and text message signals of a cell phone during four episodes of the documentary, whereas the control group was not exposed to noise. The participants’ memory retention of the content of those four episodes was tested via so called test items. 27 participants participated in the experiment, where 11 of them were in the control group and the rest in the experiment group. The results failed to find an effect of cell phone noise on participants’ memory retention. The results support the duplex-mechanism account, which means that the unitary account is not supported in the present study. However, methodological flaws and the small sample complicate the interpretation of the results. Recommendations for future research involve methodological improvements and research areas.