Utah's students, grades 4-12, create projects for the Utah History Fair, Utah's National History Day affiliate program, annually. As far as the rigors of youth academic prowess are concerned, National History Day and the Utah History Fair are amongst the top in the nation. Within the myriad of projects created by Utah's participating students is important information about what aspects of the past captures students' attention and why they choose to research their selected topics. Through a careful examination of student topics from 1981-1984 and 2009-2012, this project taps into what students comprehend about the past. Further inspection into why students choose their topics, in their own words, explains students' motives for selecting different historical events for research. On a more immediate level, the information gathered and disseminated in this thesis can be used to create stronger Utah History Fair and National History Day projects. The evidence also provides additional assistance to those seeking future utilization of the past in the grade school classroom in regards to what students are interested in studying.

Non-pathological decline in memory is a pervasive process during aging. One common age-associated condition that is linked to cognitive dysfunction is inflammation. In particular, cellular signaling via the nuclear factor kappa B pathway (NFκB), which regulates inflammation, is up-regulated during the aging process but its precise role in learning and memory across the lifespan is not fully understood. The purpose of the experiments in this dissertation were to investigate the role of NFκB in age-associated cognitive decline and to determine factors that mediate cognitive decline during aging in conditions with up-regulated NFκB signaling. To achieve these aims, young, middle-aged and aged rats were tested on a hippocampus-dependent memory task and levels of NFκB were compared between age groups and individual differences in NFκB levels were correlated with memory. In young mice, inflammation was induced via dextran sulfate sodium, and levels of NFκB and memory were compared between groups and individual variation in NFκB was correlated with behavior. Lastly, using the Midlife Development in the United States data set, the psychosocial variables that predict cognitive decline with age were examined in relation to inflammatory status. The results from this dissertation provide insight into the co-variation of NFκB signaling and cognition across the lifespan and identify important personal and experiential factors that may alter this relationship. / 1 / Andrea F Jones

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High elaborative parent-child reminiscing plays a significant role in preschoolers??? development of autobiographical memory, and, given the emotional salience of many past events, may also contribute to the development of emotion knowledge and other socio-cognitive skills. Additionally, whilst research has traditionally focused on reminiscing style, emotional content may also be important for child outcomes. In Study 1, a naturalistic paradigm was employed to examine associations of parents??? reminiscing style and emotion references with children???s emotion knowledge. Twenty-five parent-child dyads each discussed four emotionally salient past events. It was found that high elaborative parents more often discussed emotions causes than did other parents; in turn, a high elaborative style and discussion of emotion causes were each uniquely associated with children???s emotion knowledge. In Study 2 an experimental paradigm was used to examine the impact of emotion-oriented reminiscing on 88 children???s memory for a staged, emotion-rich event. Two days after participating in the event, children reminisced with an experimenter in one of four ways. Emotion-cause, emotion-expression, and no-emotion reminiscing were all high elaborative but differed in emotion content. Minimal reminiscing was low elaborative. Children who participated in emotion-cause reminiscing and, to a lesser extent, emotion-expression reminiscing, recalled significantly more emotional and non-emotional information about the event than did children who participated in no-emotion or minimal reminiscing. Study 3 aimed to extend the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by training mothers to reminisce using a high elaborative style and emotion content. 80 dyads initially participated; 44 completed all stages. After training, mothers and children in the reminiscing condition each used a more elaborative style and discussed emotions more than did their counterparts in a powerful ???child directed play??? control condition. These differences were sustained across six months, at which time children in the reminiscing condition also showed better emotion cause knowledge than did children in the control condition. Taken together, these findings suggest that children???s autobiographical memory and emotion knowledge may each develop via shared reminiscing interactions in the preschool years. In each case, the role of high-elaborative, emotion-rich reminiscing is highlighted.

The chief aim of this dissertation was to establish the respective contributions of automatic and intentional memory processes to misinformation effects in 5-, 8-, and 9-year-old children. In the first two experiments children were presented with a picture story followed by misleading post-event details that were either read to participants, or were self-generated in response to semantic and perceptual hints. Children were then presented with original and suggested items and given a yes / no recognition test under inclusion or exclusion instructions. The application of Jacoby’s (1991) process dissociation procedure to children’s recognition performance revealed that the contribution of intentional processing to misinformation acceptance increased following the self-generation of suggestions. Automatic processing made a strong contribution to misinformation effects regardless of the way that misinformation was encoded. Experiment 3 extended this general pattern of results to a forced choice recognition paradigm. Experiment 4 examined the role of social demand factors in children’s suggestibility using Belli’s (1989) yes / no retrieval paradigm. Little evidence of an influence of social demand on children’s suggestible responses was found with automatic processes again the predominant factor determining suggestibility. In the final experiment, the temporal order of the original and post-event phases was reversed such that 5-year-olds were initially presented with a post-event summary containing misinformation, followed by a witnessed event. The results of this study confirmed that children’s suggestions were unlikely to be the result of trace alteration or social demand. The implications of the findings for theoretical accounts of the misinformation effect in children’s recognition and for children’s eyewitness testimony are discussed. / PhD Doctorate

Doctor of Philosophy / The experiments described in this thesis document the development of two in vivo models, to investigate the effect of competition for peptide-MHC and factors independent of MHC on T cell proliferation, differentiation, generation of memory cells and affinity maturation. The first model made use of 3 strains of T cell receptor (TCR) transgenic (tg) mice of varying specificity for antigen-MHC class II. To determine the effect of antigen specific and non-specific competition on the early stages of the T cell response, the efficiency with which naïve antigen-specific CD4+ T cells were recruited into an ongoing immune response was investigated. Recruitment into cell division and cytokine production was shown to decrease with an increasing time delay between two cell cohorts of the same specificity, leading to a significant drop in recruitment with a delay of only 24 hours. Injection of additional antigen could partially compensate for this decrease, suggesting that lack of available antigen limited recruitment of specific cells trafficking to the node after the initiation of the response. A role for antigen non-specific factors such as access to APCs, costimulatory signals or cytokines was ruled out by showing that the response to a second, independent antigen was unaffected by an ongoing response, even when the same APCs were presenting both antigens. The second system modelled a situation in which a clone of uniformly high affinity T cells competed against a polyclonal population containing mixture of affinities. This situation would arise during a normal response to a single epitope, and would mimic the process of competition that drives affinity maturation of the CD4+ T cell response. By substituting a high affinity response to a different antigen, a more complex reaction to multiple antigens, of different affinities was modelled. To avoid any possible effect of the two antigens competing for access to processing machinery, or binding to the same MHC class II allele, the two antigens were provided as synthetic peptides that bind to different MHC molecules. The data indicated that CD4+ T cell competition for peptide-MHC is far more potent than competition between CD4+ T cell responses of different specificity. Antigen-specific competition reduced the level of T cell stimulation detected as early as day 3 of the response. In the face of high affinity antigen-specific competition, the representation of mixed affinity T cells within the effector and effector memory cells (TEM) population declined progressively throughout the primary and secondary responses, suggesting that continued access to peptide-MHC is required to maintain maximum numbers of effector and TEM cells. In contrast, the contribution of central memory (TCM) was stable from day 7 onwards. Competition by CD4+ cells of an unrelated antigenic specificity led to a minor reduction in peak cell number and cytokine production in the primary response, without altering the number or potency of memory cells. Together these two models demonstrated a mechanism whereby the immune system exerts tight control over the size and kinetics of each individual antigen specific response without affecting the ability to respond to secondary infections or late-phase lytic antigens. Overall the results demonstrate a continued requirement for TCR stimulation for the generation of effector cells and the maintenance of a population of cytokine producing memory cells. However the generation of a stable population of central memory cells was unaffected by conditions of reduced T cell stimulation, ensuring that long-term memory can be maintained in the absence of antigen.

Master of Visual Art (Sculpture) / This paper is a brief consideration of the nature of my art practice. It seeks to discover the importance of memory to the spatial, emotional and political constructs that inform my understanding of place. Within the broader context of the Australian immigrant experience, history and personal memories are explored by looking into the notion of domestic space as embodied by the house and its relationship to the home. The female role in the family is discussed in terms of the commonly understood stereotypes associated with home in western society. By traversing a range of ideas from philosophical and scientific domains, with a focus on contemporary art, the significance of memory is highlighted as the thread that holds these notions together.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis investigates the role of colour in the cognitive processesing of emotional information. The research is guided by the effect of colour diagnosticity which has been shown previously to influence recognition performance of several types of objects as well as natural scenes. The research presented in Experiment 1 examined whether colour information is considered a diagnostic perceptual feature of seven emotional categories: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise and neutral. Participants (N = 119), who were naïve to the specific purpose and expectations of the experiment, chose colour more than any other perceptual quality (e.g. shape and tactile information) as a feature that describes the seven emotional categories. The specific colour features given for the six basic emotions were consistently different from those given to the non-emotional neutral category. While emotional categories were often described by chromatic colour features (e.g. red, blue, orange) the neutral category was often ascribed achromatic colour features (e.g. white, grey, transparent) as the most symptomatic perceptual qualities for its description. The emotion 'anger' was unique in being the only emotion showing an agreement higher that 50% of the total given colour features for one particular colour - red. Confirming that colour is a diagnostic feature of emotions led to the examination of the effect of diagnostic colours of emotion on recognition memory for emotional words and faces: the effect, if any, of appropriate and inappropriate colours (matched with emotion) on the strength of memory for later recognition of faces and words (Experiments 2 & 3). The two experiments used retention intervals of 15 minutes and one week respectively and the colour-emotion associations were determined for each individual participant. Results showed that regardless of the subject’s consistency level in associating colours with emotions, and compared with the individual inappropriate or random colours, individual appropriate colours of emotions significantly enhance recognition memory for six basic emotional faces and words. This difference between the individual inappropriate colours or random colours and the individual appropriate colours of emotions was not found to be significant for non-emotional neutral stimuli. Post hoc findings from both experiments further show that appropriate colours of emotion are associated more consistently than inappropriate colours of emotions. This suggests that appropriate colour-emotion associations are unique both in their strength of association and in the form of their representation. Experiment 4 therefore aimed to investigate whether appropriate colour-emotion associations also trigger an implicit automatic cognitive system that allows faster naming times for appropriate versus inappropriate colours of emotional word carriers. Results from the combined Emotional-Semantic Stroop task confirm the above hypothesis and therefore imply that colour plays a substantial role not only in our conceptual representations of objects but also in our conceptual representations of basic emotions. The resemblance of the present findings collectively to those found previously for objects and natural scenes suggests a common cognitive mechanism for the processing of emotional diagnostic colours and the processing of diagnostic colours of objects or natural scenes. Overall, this thesis provides the foundation for many future directions of research in the area of colour and emotion as well as a few possible immediate practical implications.