Methods A standardised measurement tool was developed by identifying aspects of self that can be measured, and research methods that are effective at investigating self in people without dementia. The measure consists of three sets of illustrated ‘I am…’ statements representing Activities, Traits and Physical Characteristics, and Relationships and Occupations. Participants were asked to (i) sort these according to whether each was ‘just like me’, ‘a bit like me’ or ‘not at all like me’ (ii) sort their ‘just like me’ choices to identify the statement most like them; (iii) describe memories associated with this statement. The measure was tested with 20 people with dementia to inform refinement. The refined measure was tested for reliability and validity by comparing results from five people with dementia and six age-matched people without dementia. Results Outcome measures were strength, complexity and quality of self and an ‘episodicity’ score reflecting the descriptive richness of memories. The initial administration to 20 people indicated that the measure was suitable for people with mild to moderate dementia, and the outcomes were meaningful and reliable. An ‘Observational Framework’ was developed to enable measurement of self via gestures and expressions of people with limited verbal abilities. The second study indicated that the new measure has good test-retest reliability, but convergent validity was not demonstrated. Participants with dementia demonstrated strength, complexity and quality of self scores comparable to participants without dementia. The results suggest that providing visual cues bypasses the cognitive processes required for effortful recall. / Alzheimer’s Society

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of time-compressed narration and representational adjunct images on undergraduate college students' 1) ability to recall and recognize information in a multimedia learning environment, and 2) overall satisfaction with this type of learning environment. The goals of this research were to shed light on time-compression technology incorporated into multimedia learning environments, help fill the existing gap in the research literature by merging two disjoint bodies of research, and aid instructors and instructional designers to better understand time-compression technology while creating rigorous multimedia materials. This research was guided by the underlying principles of multimedia learning. The experiment was a 4 Audio Speeds (1.0 = normal vs. 1.5 = moderate vs. 2.0 = fast vs. 2.5 = fastest rate) x Adjunct Image (Image Present vs. Image Absent) factorial design. Audio speed and adjunct image both served as between subject conditions. Cued-recall, content recognition and learner satisfaction served as the dependent measures. Multimedia interventions were developed to execute this design. A total of 305 research participants were recruited from a public, southeastern university in the United States in this study. Fifty-five percent of the participants were male and 92% indicated that English was their primary language. Forty-nine percent of the participants were junior classification, 4% were freshman, 19% were sophomore, 26% were seniors, with the remaining indicating other. The median age of the participants was 22, and ranges in age from 18 to 53 years old. Data were analyzed using a series of factorial Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) procedures. Results showed statistically significant differences at 2.5 times the normal audio speed, in which performance on cued-recall and content recognition tasks was significantly lower than other audio speeds. Furthermore, representational adjunct images had a significant positive effect on cued-recall, but not content recognition. Participants in the normal audio speed and picture present groups were significantly more satisfied than other treatments. Recommendations for future research are provided as well as advice for instructors, instructional designers and learners interested in time-compression technology.

<p>Verbal information has predominantly been the to-be-remembered materials in human memory research for more than a century. In recent years some interesting deviations from the established rules of verbal memory have been observed in subjects who have been asked to motorically self-perform (enact) action sentences at the encoding phase of the memory task, instead of only hearing or reading them as in a traditional verbal task (VT). Marked enhancements in recall were also consistently demonstrated in such studies and the effect was named the subject-performed task (SPT) effect. Presently, the body of SPT research is large but little agreement has been reached regarding the mechanism at work in producing the SPT phenomenon. The present thesis addresses two major issues in SPT research. The enhancement of associative information and the significance of the motor component are evaluated. In Study A, the SPT effect was studied in two cued-recall tasks that relied on item-specific association and relational association, respectively. The results showed that SPT encoding interacts with item-specific associative cues at recall to produce a larger SPT effect as compared to free recall. This supports the notion that part of the SPT effect is due to enhanced item-specific association. In Study B, the associative effect in SPT was studied amongst age cohorts comprised of subjects between 40 and 85 years old. Normal age-related decline in episodic memory has elsewhere been suggested to be caused mainly by associative deficits connected with ageing. The results of Study B indicate that the item-specific associative effect in SPT was more age sensitive than recall of VT and the relational associative effect in SPT. In Study C, the question over whether the SPT effect is dependent on motor modality or not was addressed. Self-produced sign language encoding was argued to be qualitatively the same as self-produced oral/verbal encoding, with the motor modality component being the only exception. It was also argued that the motor modality component was the main similarity to performing SPT. Since the signing subjects performed at the same level as the SPT condition at recall, and better than the control conditions (e.g., VT), the conclusion was made that motor activation per se can contribute to memory enhancement in SPT. Whether SPT encoding results in qualitatively different memory traces is discussed as well as the effect of SPT on other types of associative information. The results are also briefly related to other controversies in SPT research. It is concluded, finally, that enactment produces differential effects on different types of associations. The association between verb and noun is clearly enhanced by SPT encoding. Moreover, it is concluded that overt motor activation is necessary for obtaining a full SPT effect. To explore these interactions further and to build upon these conclusions, an increased focus on motor processes and their relation to verbal processes is called for in future cognitive research.</p>

Verbal information has predominantly been the to-be-remembered materials in human memory research for more than a century. In recent years some interesting deviations from the established rules of verbal memory have been observed in subjects who have been asked to motorically self-perform (enact) action sentences at the encoding phase of the memory task, instead of only hearing or reading them as in a traditional verbal task (VT). Marked enhancements in recall were also consistently demonstrated in such studies and the effect was named the subject-performed task (SPT) effect. Presently, the body of SPT research is large but little agreement has been reached regarding the mechanism at work in producing the SPT phenomenon. The present thesis addresses two major issues in SPT research. The enhancement of associative information and the significance of the motor component are evaluated. In Study A, the SPT effect was studied in two cued-recall tasks that relied on item-specific association and relational association, respectively. The results showed that SPT encoding interacts with item-specific associative cues at recall to produce a larger SPT effect as compared to free recall. This supports the notion that part of the SPT effect is due to enhanced item-specific association. In Study B, the associative effect in SPT was studied amongst age cohorts comprised of subjects between 40 and 85 years old. Normal age-related decline in episodic memory has elsewhere been suggested to be caused mainly by associative deficits connected with ageing. The results of Study B indicate that the item-specific associative effect in SPT was more age sensitive than recall of VT and the relational associative effect in SPT. In Study C, the question over whether the SPT effect is dependent on motor modality or not was addressed. Self-produced sign language encoding was argued to be qualitatively the same as self-produced oral/verbal encoding, with the motor modality component being the only exception. It was also argued that the motor modality component was the main similarity to performing SPT. Since the signing subjects performed at the same level as the SPT condition at recall, and better than the control conditions (e.g., VT), the conclusion was made that motor activation per se can contribute to memory enhancement in SPT. Whether SPT encoding results in qualitatively different memory traces is discussed as well as the effect of SPT on other types of associative information. The results are also briefly related to other controversies in SPT research. It is concluded, finally, that enactment produces differential effects on different types of associations. The association between verb and noun is clearly enhanced by SPT encoding. Moreover, it is concluded that overt motor activation is necessary for obtaining a full SPT effect. To explore these interactions further and to build upon these conclusions, an increased focus on motor processes and their relation to verbal processes is called for in future cognitive research.

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 43 pages. / Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: Processing Implicit and Explicit Representations (PIER2) is a model of memory that makes predictions about memory performance based on the interaction of known and newly acquired information by studying how implicitly activated associates affect episodic memory. Nelson and Zhang (2000) found a significant effect of cue connectivity in a multiple regression analysis of the variables known to affect cued recall, but at that time no manipulational experiments had studied the cue connectivity effect in the laboratory. The present paper presents a series of three experiments designed to investigate the effect of cue connectivity in the context of the PIER2 memory model to determine the importance of this variable in the prediction of cued recall. / ABSTRACT: Results of the experiments were inconsistent, and a revised regression analysis performed on an updated version of Nelson and Zhang's (2000) cued recall database indicated that cue connectivity was no longer a significant predictor of cued recall performance. It was concluded that PIER2's equations do not need to be modified to include the influence of retrieval cue attributes. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

There have been many theories on why we forget. One of the recent approaches to this phenomenon is retrieval induced forgetting (RIF). The present study investigated RIF and different kinds of disruptions and their effects by using extra-list cued recall task. Some participants studied two additional word lists after the target list and some participants studied and were tested from these interpolated lists before their final recall of target list. Relatedness of the interfering lists was also manipulated. There were two control groups that either got an immediate test or got a math task before memory test. The particular interest was on the target competitor effect. The results of the study indicated that all the disruption conditions reduced the effects of competitors. However, there was no effect of retrieval-induced forgetting and also no effect of relatedness. The importance of retention interval on forgetting was discussed.

Learning occurs not only when we encode information but also when we test our memory for this information at a later time. In three empirical studies, I investigated the individual and combined effects of interleaved testing (via repeated rounds of study and test practice) and encoding (via motor enactment) during learning on later cued-recall performance for action phrases. Such materials (e.g., “water the flowers”) contain a verb and a noun and approximate everyday memory that typically revolves around past and future actions. Study I demonstrated that both interleaved testing (vs. study only) and enactment (vs. verbal encoding) individually reduced the forgetting rate over a period of 1 week, but these effects were nonadditive. That is, the direct testing effect on the forgetting rate occurred for verbal, but not for enactive encoding; enactment reduced the forgetting rate for the study-only condition, but not for the study–test condition. A possible explanation of these findings is that both study techniques sufficiently elicit verb–noun relational processing that cannot be increased further by combining them. In Studies II and III, I replicated these testing-effect results and investigated whether they varied as a function of recall type (i.e., noun-cued recall of verbs and verb-cued recall of nouns). For verbal encoding (Study II), the direct testing effect was of similar size for both noun- and verb-cued recall. For enactive encoding, the direct testing effect was lacking irrespective of recall type. In addition, interleaved tests enhanced subsequent re-encoding of action phrases, leading to an accelerated learning. This indirect testing effect was increased for the noun-cued recall of verbs—for both verbal and enactive encoding. A possible explanation is that because nouns are semantically more stable, in that the meaning of nouns changes less over time and across different contexts, they are more recognizable. Hence, associated information (e.g., about the recall status) may be more available to the learner during restudy that, in turn, can initiate more effective re-encoding. The two different testing benefits (i.e., direct and indirect) may, partly, engage different mechanisms, as they were influenced differentially by the manipulations of encoding type and recall type. The findings presented in the thesis provide new knowledge regarding the combined effects of strategies and materials that influence memory. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1. Epub ahead of print. Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript.</p>

Memory structure, memory assessment, Grober-Buschke paradigm, Alzheimer disease, and vascular dementia were discussed in the first part of the present thesis. Present study aims to examine the relationship between white matter changes, hippocampal atrophy and the performance in Enhanced Cued Recall test in nondemented geriatric population (n = 104). Partial neparametric correlations were used while controlling for age and Fazekas score. Medium correlations were found between left/right hippocampal volumes and free and total recall. No correlations were found between Fazekas score and ECR scores while controlling for age and left and right hippocampal volumes. Keywords: hippocampal atrophy, white matter changes, cued recall, ECR

Although much research has been done on how well working memory predicts processing of consciously activated information, research on the possible influences of working memory on automatically activated information is scarce (Barrett, Tugade, & Engle, 2004). Working memory capacity (WMC) may be related to how much information is activated automatically by either aiding ease of access to relevant information or by its role in inhibiting irrelevant thoughts and information (i.e., noise). The purpose of the present study was to examine the contribution of individual differences in WMC on implicit and explicit processes in cued recall. Participants studied target words and recall was cued by associatively related words. Target connectivity was varied in Experiment 1 and target set size was varied in Experiment 2. The cued recall memory test was conducted after various retention intervals (0, 10 and 20 mins). In addition, memory span of all participants was measured with both operation and counting span tasks. Finally, all participants studied a second list of words under divided attention instructions. The present experiments examined 1) the influence of retention interval on cued recall performance, 2) the influence of individual differences in WMC on cued recall after various retention intervals and 3) the role of WMC and divided attention on implicitly activated knowledge (i.e., connectivity and set size effects). The findings revealed that working memory is related to intentional (explicit) types of processes, but not related to implicit processes outside of a person's awareness. WMC also interacted with retention interval. This finding is compatible with an attentional interpretation of WMC that assumes the high span advantage is apparent only when there is interference. Surprisingly, low span participants tended to outperform high span individuals on an immediate test. These findings are explained by differences in maintenance of information and rehearsal, and retrieval strategies.

Processing Implicit and Explicit Representations (PIER2) is a model of memory that makes predictions about memory performance based on the interaction of known and newly acquired information by studying how implicitly activated associates affect episodic memory. Nelson and Zhang (2000) found a significant effect of cue connectivity in a multiple regression analysis of the variables known to affect cued recall, but at that time no manipulational experiments had studied the cue connectivity effect in the laboratory. The present paper presents a series of three experiments designed to investigate the effect of cue connectivity in the context of the PIER2 memory model to determine the importance of this variable in the prediction of cued recall. Results of the experiments were inconsistent, and a revised regression analysis performed on an updated version of Nelson and Zhang's (2000) cued recall database indicated that cue connectivity was no longer a significant predictor of cued recall performance. It was concluded that PIER2's equations do not need to be modified to include the influence of retrieval cue attributes.