Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-67)

The distinctiveness effect refers to the empirical finding of superior memory for items that stand out from the environment relative to common stimuli. Two variants of distinctiveness paradigms (isolation effect and orthographic distinctiveness) were examined under intentional learning instructions. The isolation effect was also examined using incidental learning instructions. Both groups exhibited distinctiveness effects; further, these effects were accompanied by increases in recollection and familiarity with intentional learning only. This finding is surprising as older adults normatively show declines in recollection with advancing age. Under incidental instructions, none of the groups demonstrated distinctiveness effects, and estimates of recollection and familiarity were identical for distinct and non-distinct items. There was no evidence for heightened objective source memory for distinct items, across the three experiments. These results contribute to a growing literature that older adults can benefit from the presence of distinct information; however, not with incidental learning instructions. Furthermore, the current experiments suggest that in distinctiveness paradigms, older adults are able to display estimates of recollection that are commensurate with young adults. This outcome may arise because distinctiveness paradigms support relational processing, which in turn can improve item-specific processing and boost recollection judgments.

Ten male and 10 female participants were presented with six narrative paragraphs and six 10 word lists. Three of the paragraphs were emotional and three were neutral. Each of the paragraphs contained 20 information units and each word list included five neutral and five emotional words. Immediately following paragraph or word list presentation, the participants were asked to recall the stimuli. The mean percent of emotional units (i.e. units of information recalled from emotional paragraphs) recalled was significantly greater than the mean percent of neutral units recalled. Similarly, the mean percent emotional words recalled from word lists was significantly greater than the mean percent neutral words recalled from word lists. Percent recall was significantly greater for words than for paragraphs for both emotional and neutral stimuli. Results supported the hypothesis that emotional saliency increases verbal recall. / text

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Abnormally slow processing of language may be a factor contributing to the poor verbal memory seen in many patients with lesions of the anterior temporal region in the left hemisphere. This possibility was examined by comparing the performance of 12 patients with left temporal-lobe resections (LT), 10 patients with similar lesions in the right hemisphere (RT) and 13 normal control (NC) subjects on a lexical-decision task, a sentence-plausibility-judgement task, and a story-recall task. Stimuli were presented aurally, and, in the latter two tasks, at 5 different speech rates ranging from 125 words per minute (wpm) to 325 wpm. Recall of stories by LT subjects was not abnormally sensitive to the effect of increasing rate, although it was inferior to that by NC subjects at all speeds. LT patients presented aurally but not visually (Frisk and Milner, 1991), suggesting that the left anterior temporal region plays a special role in the processing of speech sounds.

In Part I of this thesis, recognition of natural scenes was tested in 72 patients with unilateral frontal- or temporal-lobe excisions and 32 normal control subjects (NC). The occurrence of a novel scene in the midst of a series of other scenes normally induces forgetting of the scene that had preceded the novel one. This phenomenon was not observed following right frontal- and right temporal-lobe lesions, and was only partially present after left temporal-lobe excisions that included the hippocampus (LTH). These brain regions were thus seen as part of a circuit that codes novel stimuli. In Part 2, recall of lists of words was examined in 77 patients and 12 normal control subjects. Both the left frontal-lobe (LF) and LTH groups recalled fewer words overall than the other groups; their performance was normal, however, when the words were pre-organized into categories and when category labels were supplied during test. In another experiment it was demonstrated that the LF group was impaired when category exemplars were provided together with the category labels, the LTH group being unaffected in this condition. It was concluded that left frontal-lobe lesions may affect retrieval mechanisms.

An Examination of Print and Web Graphics’ Effect on Readers’ Recall Specific research regarding how information graphics, which are defined as charts, maps or diagrams, in print and online affect readers’ recall and understanding of information is scarce at best and at times, even contradictory. Previous print research suggests that information graphics does improve readers’ recall. Online graphics research notes that the freedom of the Web allows readers to learn more efficiently than traditional media. While, other research notes that the Web’s freedom causes users to spend more effort on orienting themselves with the Web site, and therefore, users don’t learn efficiently. This study examined whether the presentation of information graphics affects readers’ recall and found no statistical significance between readers’ recall scores who had read a print graphic and those who read an online graphic. / Department of Journalism

In Part I, recall of spatial location was studied in an incidental-learning situation, where patients with unilateral brain lesions, the amnesic patient, H. M., and normal control subjects were asked to estimate the prices of objects in an array. All patient groups could encode location normally, but patients with right temporal-lobe lesions that included extensive hippocampal removal showed abnormally rapid forgetting. For all groups, and for H. M., location-recall did not differ under automatic and under effortful encoding conditions. It is argued that these results point to the importance of hippocampal-ceocortical interactions in spatial memory. In Part II, patients with frontal-lobe lesions were shown to be impaired in judging the frequency with which words or designs occurred in a list. With words, the deficits were demonstrable for both examiner-provided and self-generated stimuli. This impairment may be attributable either to a disorderly search process or to a deficit in cognitive estimation, or both.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- McMaster University, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-102). Also available via World Wide Web.