The time required to identify a common object depends on several factors, especially pre-existing knowledge and episodic representations newly established as a result of a prior study. My research examined how these factors contribute to identification of objects (both studied and non-studied) and to performance on explicit memory tests. The overall goal was to explore the link between memory and object perception. One series of experiments examined influences due to object orientation in the plane of the page. Subjects were shown color photos of objects, and memory was assessed either with an old/new recognition test or with a test that required them to identify objects that were slowly faded in on a computer monitor. The critical variables were the type of photo — each showing either an object with a predominant or cardinal orientation (e.g., helicopter) or a non-cardinal object (e.g., pencil), and the orientation at which the photos were displayed at study and at test (e.g., rotated 0°, 120°, or 240°). For non-studied targets, identification test performance showed a large effect due to display orientation, but only for cardinal objects. For studied targets, study-to-test changes in orientation influenced priming for both non-cardinal and cardinal objects, but orientation specific priming effects (larger priming when study and test orientations matched rather than mismatched) were much larger with cardinal than non-cardinal objects, especially, when their display orientation, at test was unusual (i.e., 120°, 240°). A second series of experiments examined influences due to object size (size of an object presented alone) and relative size (size of an object relative to another object). Size manipulations had a large effect on identification of non-studied objects but study-to- test changes in size had only a minimal effect on priming. In contrast, study1to-test changes in relative size influenced recognition decision speed which is an index of priming. The combined findings suggest that both semantic and episodic representations behave as if they coded orientation but only for cardinal objects. They also suggest that episodic representations code relative size but not size information. The findings are explained by the instance views of memory. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

This experiment investigated memory changes across the adult lifespan and some factors that might be associated with these changes. Adult participants of all ages (16 to 83 years old) were asked to orally describe scenic color photographs, and then following a delay, to re-describe these pictures from memory. Given information is objective, physical objects and their attributes that are depicted in a target picture, whereas beyond information is subjective, personal experiences and inferences that are not depicted in a target picture per se but are associated with a target picture. Chapter 3 examined the content of these picture descriptions for the amount of given and beyond information that was encoded and retrieved about target pictures. The results indicated an age-related decline in memory for given information and preserved memory for beyond information. Chapter 4 examined the relationship between perceptual and verbal ability and memory for given and beyond information. Perceptual ability was assessed by self-report measures of auditory and visual ability and verbal ability was measured by a standardized test. The results indicated that an age-related improvement in verbal ability, but not an age-related decline in perceptual ability, was related to memory for given and beyond information. Chapter 5 explored age-related changes in memory for feminine and masculine information across the adult female lifespan. Feminine and masculine information is information that would be considered exclusively relevant to young women and men, respectively. The results indicated an age-related increase in memory for feminine information and no age-related change in memory for masculine information. The divergent age-related changes in memory for given and beyond information and for feminine and masculine information were interpreted in terms of a developmental approach to schema theory and the lifespan psychology notions of selective optimization with compensation and loss in the service of growth. The present study suggests an integration between the domains of personality and cognitive psychology as one avenue for future research that could lead to a more complete understanding of memory and aging. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Flashbulb memories are highly vivid and long-lasting memories for events that are emotionally significant and personally important. These memories are held in very high confidence in accuracy over an extended period. In particular, individuals believe that they can remember the personal details surrounding the event such as where they were and what they were doing at the time the event occurred. Evidence from research, however, indicates that this may not be the case. The study of flashbulb memories has typically been confined to negative events such as September 11, 2001. In the current study, we employ the methods of Talarico and Rubin (2003) to investigate flashbulb memory formation to a positive event. The event is the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which resonated as a highly positive event for many Americans evidenced by the thousands of people flooding the streets of Washington, D.C. and New York City to celebrate. We examined various memory properties over a one-year period, including vividness, rehearsal, belief in accuracy, and consistency. Results confirm the formation of flashbulb memories to the assassination event, but results did not support many of the proposed hypotheses. Some differences were found for different testing groups (i.e., immediate versus one week delay), but these were not replicated at the one year follow-up. Overall, however, it is believed that the current event, while still a flashbulb memory, was not a strong enough event to stir strong emotions and form memories on par with 9/11.

This study investigated the influence of age and health status on verbal and visual memory and attention. The objective was to select subjects resembling participants in normative studies, and to contrast the genuinely healthy component with the "contaminants." A rigorous and detailed self-report of health status plus a standard neurological examination were used to screen and divide subjects into two health status groups: normal and super healthy. It was speculated that the strong effect of age on memory and attention commonly found among the elderly would be diminished with more restrictive control over health status.

No description available.

Hypnosis has gained substantial support in the psychological community, as well as related health professions. The intense renewal of interest in hypnosis has also affected our legal-judicial system. Many police investigators trained in hypnosis operate from an exactcopy memory theory. They claim eyewitness eyewitness retrieve veridically stored memory traces from long-term memory, if questioned under hypnosis. Conversely, other researchers ascribe to a reconstructive memory theory. They believe hypnosis increases the likelihood of eliciting erroneous memories from eyewitnesses, especially under leading questioning. The purpose of the present investigation was to test the effects of hypnotic induction and anxiety on the accuracy of subjects' memory for eyewitnessed events when questioned with leading, non-leading, and embedded misinformation questions.

Capital equipment costs and energy costs are the major cost drivers in datacenters. Prior works have explored various techniques, like efficient scheduling algorithms and advanced power management techniques, to maximize resource utilization to reduce the capital and energy costs. The project HEXO has explored heterogeneous-Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) server-embedded clusters to minimize the cost. HEXO's key idea is to migrate stateful virtual machines from high-performance x86-based servers to low-power, low-cost ARM-based embedded boards, reducing server's resource congestion and thereby improving throughput and energy efficiency. However, embedded boards generally have significantly lower onboard memory, typically in the range of 100MB to 4GB. Due to this limitation, high memory-demand applications cannot be migrated to embedded devices. This limits the scope of applications that can be used with heterogeneous-ISA server-embedded clusters such as HEXO. This thesis proposes Netswap, a mechanism that utilizes the server's free memory as remote memory for the embedded board. Netswap comprises three main components: the swap-out and swap-in mechanism, a bitmap-based Free Memory Manager, and the Netswap Remote Daemon. Experimental studies using micro- and macro benchmarks reveal that Netswap improves the throughput and energy efficiency of server-embedded clusters by as much as 40% and 20%, respectively, over server-only baselines. / Master of Science / Datacenters have major expenditures like capital costs and energy expenditures. The project HEXO addresses in reducing these expenditures by including small embedded devices in datacenters. These embedded devices are cheaper and consume less energy than a typical server, but they have limited onboard RAM. The memory limitation restricts HEXO's ability to run applications with higher memory demand. This thesis introduces Netswap, which solves this issue by utilizing the free memory available on the servers as a secondary memory for the connected embedded devices. We discussed various design choices for efficiently implementing such a remote memory mechanism.

Prescription drug advertisements are commonly seen in magazines and on television, and as a result, the public is familiar with them. Many drug ads are targeted toward older adults, who tend to use more medications, because they suffer from more chronic conditions than younger adults. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of drug advertising at persuading older adults to ask physicians for specific medications remains uncertain. Older adults’ explicit memory for drug ads is poor, but their implicit memory for drug ads may be better. Therefore, older adults may be implicitly persuaded by drug ads even when they cannot explicitly remember seeing them. The current study measured implicit memory with an incidental ratings exercise and an indirect test of preference; explicit memory was measured with intentional studying and a direct test of recognition. The purposes of the study were to compare implicit and explicit memory for drug ads in older and younger adults, to determine whether age differences in memory are affected by salient information or anxiety, and to demonstrate that a test of implicit memory may be useful in estimating advertising effectiveness. The results showed no age difference for implicit memory for drug ads, but an age difference was found for explicit memory for drug ads. However, contrary to hypotheses, neither salient information nor anxiety had an effect on implicit or explicit memory. The results were consistent with previous research demonstrating implicit memory in the absence of explicit memory. Although older adults had slightly worse explicit memory, both implicit and explicit memory for drug ads was generally good in both groups. The results were also obtained within the everyday context of prescription drug advertising, which extends memory research to an important real-world setting. Ethical considerations for research on aging and advertising are discussed. Drug ads are designed to be persuasive, but ads should be carefully designed to inform consumers, rather than to manipulate them. The implicit memory manipulation succeeded in demonstrating that ads are persuasive, suggesting that a complete assessment of advertising effectiveness should include a test of implicit memory.

No description available.

With the advent of byte-addressable Non-Volatile Memory (NVMM), the need for a safe, scalable and high-performing memory allocator is inevitable. A slow memory allocator can bottleneck the entire application stack, while an unsecure memory allocator can render underlying systems and applications inconsistent upon program bugs or system failure. Unlike DRAM-based memory allocators, it is indispensable for an NVMM allocator to guarantee its heap metadata safety from both internal and external errors. An effective NVMM memory allocator should be 1) safe 2) scalable and 3) high performing. Unfortunately, none of the existing persistent memory allocators achieve all three requisites; critically, we also note: the de-facto NVMM allocator, Intel's Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK), is vulnerable to silent data corruption and persistent memory leaks as result of a simple heap overflow. We closely investigate the existing defacto NVMM memory allocators, especially PMDK, to study their vulnerability to metadata corruption and reasons for poor performance and scalability. We propose Poseidon, which is safe, fast and scalable. The premise of Poseidon revolves around providing a user application with per-CPU sub-heaps for scalability, while managing the heap metadata in a segregated fashion and efficiently protecting the metadata using a scalable hardware-based protection scheme, Intel's Memory Protection Keys (MPK). We evaluate Poseidon with a wide array of microbenchmarks and real-world benchmarks, noting: Poseidon outperforms the state-of-art allocators by a significant margin, showing improved scalability and performance, while also guaranteeing metadata safety. / Master of Science / Since the dawn of time, civilization has revolved around effective communication. From smoke signals to telegraphs and beyond, communication has continued to be a cornerstone of successful societies. Today, communication and collaboration occur, daily, on a global scale, such that even sub-second units of time are critical to successful societal operation. Naturally, many forms of modern communication revolve around our digital systems, such as personal computers, email servers, and social networking database applications. There is, thus, a never-ending surge of digital system development, constantly striving toward increased performance. For some time, increasing a system's dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, has been able to provide performance gains; unfortunately, due to thermal and power constraints, such an increase is no longer feasible. Additionally, loss of power on a DRAM system causes bothersome loss of data, since the memory storage is volatile to power loss. Now, we are on the advent of an entirely new physical memory system, termed non-volatile main memory (NVMM), which has near identical performance properties to DRAM, but is operational in much larger quantities, thus allowing increased overall system speed. Alas, such a system also imposes additional requirements upon software developers; since, for NVMM, all memory updates are permanent, such that a failed update can cause persistent memory corruption. Regrettably, the existing software standard, led by Intel's Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK), is both unsecure (allowing for permanent memory corruption, with ease), low performance, and a bottleneck for multicore systems. Here, we present a secure, high performing solution, termed Poseidon, which harnesses the full potential of NVMM.