The current study explored the influence of priming vantage point at retrieval on the recall of younger and older adults, in addition to the effects of visualization ability on recall. Based on McIsaac and Eich’s (2002) findings of the effects on younger adults’ recall, it was hypothesized that recollections would be more likely to include certain features when retrieved through the field vantage point (FVP) than through the observer vantage point (OVP) and vice-versa. Additionally, it was expected that older adults would recall more detailed memories from the OVP than from the FVP. Finally, it was hypothesized that visualization ability would influence memory vividness and that it would be more influential in older adults than in younger adults. The experiment was conducted across two sessions. In Session 1, participants completed a visual imagery assessment, and memories were created in the laboratory with younger (n = 20; 18-21 years old) and older (n = 18; 63-88 years old) adults through the completion of two activities. In Session 2, participants recalled the activities from either the FVP or the OVP. Participants’ recollections were coded for various memory characteristics, which acted as dependent variables in analyses. A significant interaction effect (p = .003) between age and vantage point was found on the characteristic of psychological state, such that older adults referred to their psychological state in FVP memories more than in OVP memories (p = .002), while younger adults demonstrated no significant difference. Imagery ability significantly predicted several aspects of participants’ subjective recall experience. Overall, the results indicate that retrieval vantage point does not change the content of one’s recollections on most measures for either younger or older adults and that visual mental imagery ability predicts several aspects of one’s recall experience.

Aging is typically associated with declining mental abilities, most prominent for some forms of memory. There are, however, large inter-individual differences within the older population. Some people experience rapid decline whereas others seem almost spared from any adverse effects of aging. This thesis examined the neural underpinnings of such individual differences by using longitudinal observations of episodic memory change across 15-20 years, combined with structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. Study I found significant correlations between volume and activity of the hippocampus (HC), and memory change over a 6-year period. That is, individuals with decline in HC function also had declining memory. In contrast, Study II showed that successfully aged individuals, who maintained high memory scores over 15-20 years, had preserved HC function compared to age-matched elderly with average memory change. The successful agers had HC activity levels comparable to those of young individuals, as well as higher frontal activity. Study III revealed that individual differences in memory ability and brain activity of elderly reflect both differential age-related changes, and individual differences in memory ability that are present already in midlife, when age effects are minimal. Specifically, memory scores obtained 15-20 years earlier reliably predicted brain activity in memory-relevant regions such as the frontal cortex and HC. This observation challenges results from previous cross-sectional aging studies that did not consider individual differences in cognitive ability from youth. Collectively the three studies implicate HC and frontal cortex function behind heterogeneity in cognitive aging, both substantiating and qualifying previous results from cross-sectional studies. More generally, the findings highlight the importance of longitudinal estimates of cognitive change for fully understanding the mechanisms of neurocognitive aging. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript.</p>

Nothing has been that consistent as the change is for the knowledge revolution to nourish and cultivate. Different forms of changes are occurring in organizations with the aim to improve the output performances. Health organizations have been more attached to the changes and the consequences that are brought with such changes. Such consequences are primarily connected with concepts of unlearning and learning. Any form of the change if initiated in organization asks for new routines learning, tasks conductions and the organizational cultural revolution. These new routines have been occurring at individual and organizational levels. The unlearning at any level in the organizational culture can be performed through investigating a primary connection between the organizational and individual routines. At the individual level unlearning brings a number of psychological, cognitive, social and moral hurdles. These hurdles at individual level basically help the organizational unlearning to occur. All of the routines occurring at individual level encompass the necessary information that goes from lower levels to upward, strengthening and holding the organizational memory firm. This research was about to find how the health organizations unlearn the older practices and learn the new practices in IT change. This research had two streams i) finding whether there had been any connection between the organizational and individual unlearning in the cases of IT change, ii) For unlearning what kind of hurdles had been there at the individual level. Kalmar hospital pediatric department had been chosen for the empirical investigations. The research streams were about how and what parts which helped the researcher to go for the qualitative data gathering techniques. The Results showed there had been a very thin connectivity between the organizational and individual unlearning. The results revealed and unfolded that many of the new learning are occurring simultaneously with discarding the older ways of practices. The impression of absorbing the change with respect to the unlearning had been varied from person to person. There had been a numbers of individual hurdles observed at individual level of unlearning. Apart from them, many individual routines (performative tasks) had the primary connectivity with the organizational routines (Ostensive routines) and shaping and reshaping of the organizational memory. It is important to understand the unlearning notions with the type of change. In this research each of the interviewee had shared his thoughts of how the things could have been done differently by revealing the consequences with new learning. Literature suggests that for a profound and successful implementation of change more formal and informal trainings, clear strategy for shuffling the older individuals in the camp, more social and cognitive meetings and fast and quick actions in the cases of technical difficulties are to be taken. / Thesis

Nothing has been that consistent as the change is for the knowledge revolution to nourish and cultivate. Different forms of changes are occurring in organizations with the aim to improve the output performances. Health organizations have been more attached to the changes and the consequences that are brought with such changes. Such consequences are primarily connected with concepts of unlearning and learning. Any form of the change if initiated in organization asks for new routines learning, tasks conductions and the organizational cultural revolution. These new routines have been occurring at individual and organizational levels. The unlearning at any level in the organizational culture can be performed through investigating a primary connection between the organizational and individual routines. At the individual level unlearning brings a number of psychological, cognitive, social and moral hurdles. These hurdles at individual level basically help the organizational unlearning to occur. All of the routines occurring at individual level encompass the necessary information that goes from lower levels to upward, strengthening and holding the organizational memory firm. This research was about to find how the health organizations unlearn the older practices and learn the new practices in IT change. This research had two streams i) finding whether there had been any connection between the organizational and individual unlearning in the cases of IT change, ii) For unlearning what kind of hurdles had been there at the individual level. Kalmar hospital pediatric department had been chosen for the empirical investigations. The research streams were about how and what parts which helped the researcher to go for the qualitative data gathering techniques. The Results showed there had been a very thin connectivity between the organizational and individual unlearning. The results revealed and unfolded that many of the new learning are occurring simultaneously with discarding the older ways of practices. The impression of absorbing the change with respect to the unlearning had been varied from person to person. There had been a numbers of individual hurdles observed at individual level of unlearning. Apart from them, many individual routines (performative tasks) had the primary connectivity with the organizational routines (Ostensive routines) and shaping and reshaping of the organizational memory. It is important to understand the unlearning notions with the type of change. In this research each of the interviewee had shared his thoughts of how the things could have been done differently by revealing the consequences with new learning. Literature suggests that for a profound and successful implementation of change more formal and informal trainings, clear strategy for shuffling the older individuals in the camp, more social and cognitive meetings and fast and quick actions in the cases of technical difficulties are to be taken. / Thesis

Knowledge is an increasingly important asset for organizational competition, and knowledge management becomes the most important issue for an organization. Building knowledge ontology is a good solution to increase knowledge reusability. Ontology explicitly defines concepts and their relationships, which can facilitate user understanding and further analysis. Based on previous research (Wu, 2006; Chuang, 2006), this research proposes a refined method for the construction of event ontology. The method includes text pre-processing, event ontology construction, and event ontology presentation. The text pre-processing module includes POS tagger, word filter, and term analysis. Based on the concept of sub-event, we can build a 3-level architecture of event ontology that includes sub-events, events, and topics in the event ontology construction module. Event ontology construction module developed in the project provides a friendly editing environment for the user to edit the concepts and attributes of an event that may cover ¡§who,¡¨ ¡§what,¡¨ ¡§where,¡¨ and ¡§what object.¡¨ In the event ontology presentation module, event episode may be illustrated by event frames, flow charts, and Gantt charts. To verify the feasibility of the proposed method, a prototype system has been built. The Alexander Poison Event was used as an example to demonstrate the value of the prototype system.

I conduct experiments to investigate how episodic knowledge obtained from prior experience as an auditor or a manager affects audit committee members' judgment in supporting the auditor in a disagreement with management. This paper sheds light on the advantage of first-hand accounting-related experience in the important oversight task. It also brings to bear the potential benefit from direct manager experience as claimed by researchers and regulators. I find that the episodic knowledge obtained from prior experience as an auditor, especially the experience of having been a diligent auditor, strengthens the degree of auditor support of participants in the role of an audit committee member. By contrast, the effect of episodic knowledge from first-hand experience as a manager on the likelihood of auditor support varies with the manager type. While the episodic knowledge acquired from direct experience as an aggressive manager augments the level of auditor support, such knowledge attained by prior experience as a conservative manager has no significant effect.

Atkinson and Shiffrin's (1968) dual-store model of memory includes a structural memory store along with control processes conceptualized as a rehearsal buffer. I present a variant of Atkinson and Shiffrin's buffer model within a global memory framework that accounts for findings previously thought to be difficult for it to explain. This model assumes a limited capacity buffer where information is stored about items, along with information about associations between items and between items and the context in which they are studied. The strength of association between items and context is limited by the number of items simultaneously occupying the buffer. New findings that directly test the buffer assumptions are presented, including serial position effects, and conditional and first recall probabilities in immediate and delayed free recall, in a continuous distractor paradigm, and in experiments using list length manipulations of single item and paired item study lists. Overall, the model's predictions are supported by the data from these experiments, suggesting that control processes, conceptualized as a rehearsal buffer, are a necessary component of memory models.

This thesis considers cognitive narrative a component of intelligence that specializes in generality. In exploring the ubiquitous external (mediated) and internal (cognitive) functions of narrative it provides two contributions to the literature: a uniquely cross-discipline survey of narratology that bridges humanities, social science, and computational fields; and a theory to generate cognitive personal narratives from ongoing perception. The implications of narrative cognition and cognitive narrative are discussed as well as the limitations of this introductory theory and the grounds for promising future work.

Goal-directed episodic simulation, the imaginative construction of a hypothetical personal event or series of events focused on a specific goal, is essential to our everyday lives. We often imagine how we could solve a problem or achieve a goal in the future, or how we could have avoided a misstep in the past, but many of the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying such goal-directed simulations have yet to be explored. The three papers of this dissertation investigated the neural correlates of three types of future episodic simulations in Papers 1 and 2 and examined a fourth such simulation directed at past events as an adaptive, constructive process in Paper 3. Some research has associated default network activity with internally-focused, but not with goal-directed cognition. Papers 1 and 2 of this dissertation showed that regions of the default network could form functional networks with regions of the frontoparietal control network while participants imagined solving specific problems or going through a sequence of steps necessary to achieve a personal goal. When participants imagined events they associated with actually attaining a goal, default network regions flexibly coupled with reward-processing regions, providing evidence that the default network can join forces with other networks or components thereof to support goal-directed episodic simulations. Using two distinct paradigms with both young and older adults, Paper 3 focused on episodic counterfactual simulations of how past events could have turned out differently and tested whether counterfactual simulations could affect participants' memory of the original events. Our results revealed that episodic counterfactual simulations can act as a type of internally generated misinformation by causing source confusion between the original event and the imagined counterfactual outcome, especially in older adults. The findings of the three papers in this dissertation lay the groundwork for further research on the behavioral and neural mechanisms of goal-directed episodic simulations, as well as their adaptive functions and possible downsides. / Psychology

This paper describes two experiments, each of which investigated the impact of stress on human episodic memory. All participants watched narrated slide shows containing emotional and neutral information. Experiment 1 demonstrated that pre-learning exposure to a psychological stressor (the Trier Social Stress Test or "TSST"; Kirschbaum, Pirke &amp; Hellhammer, 1993) preserved or enhanced memory for emotional aspects of the slide show, but impaired memory for neutral aspects of the slide show. Moreover, stress exposure disrupted memory for information that was visually and thematically central to the slide show. Memory for peripheral information, on the other hand, was unaffected by stress. Experiment 2 replicated these results and extended them to a similar paradigm, where participants viewed separate emotional and neutral slide shows, and saliva was tested for the stress hormones cortisol and norepinephrine. Similar to the results of Experiment 1, stress disrupted memory for the neutral slide show, but enhanced memory for the emotional slide show. Salivary cortisol levels at retrieval were negatively correlated with memory for the neutral slide show. These results are consistent with theories invoking differential effects of stress on brain systems responsible for encoding and retrieving emotional memories (the amygdala) and non-emotional memories (e.g. the hippocampal formation, frontal cortex), and inconsistent with the view that memories formed under high levels of stress are qualitatively the same as those formed under ordinary emotional circumstances. These data, which are also consistent with results obtained in a number of studies using animals and humans, have implications for the traumatic memory debate and theories regarding human memory.