Memory

The current study examined how viewing an event from different perspectives (eye-level and elevated) at both encoding and retrieval changes the recognition of that event. Specifically, participants were shown various manipulations to the scenarios that they witnessed at encoding. The primary focus of the study was the participants’ ability to identify old scenarios along with scenarios that had been manipulated through differences in character clothing, object placement, or temporal order of events, while still resembling the old scenario in every other way. No support was found to support the prediction that perspective at either encoding or retrieval had an effect on recognition of the scenario or the different manipulation types. An exploratory analysis revealed a trend towards significance for perspective at encoding. An eye-level perspective at encoding was more likely to result in a higher rejection rate for temporal manipulations.

Kersten et al. (2021) revealed that participants remembered negatively valenced actions better than neutral actions, but did no better at binding negative actions with the people who performed them compared to neutral actions. We were interested in testing whether emotion only enhances memory for individual features of an event, or whether emotion can also enhance binding of certain combinations of features. In particular, we tested the effect of emotionally charged objects on the ability to remember those objects and the actions associated with them. Participants saw a series of brief videos each involving an actor performing one of two different actions on one of two objects within a specific object category (e.g., guns or piñatas), some objects neutral in valence, some positive, and some negative. Participants were later tested on their ability to distinguish old events from novel conjunctions of particular objects with the actions that had been previously performed with the other members of the same object categories. Although only marginally significant, participants appeared more able to bind objects with their associated actions when those objects held a negative charge compared to neutral objects. Additionally, participants were more sensitive to changes in actions when those actions were associated with negative objects compared to neutral or positive objects. However, false memory increased when new negative objects were presented compared to novel presentation of neutral or positive objects.

Previous research indicates that event boundaries can hinder or facilitate memory. The present study aimed to examine the influence of physical context changes (i.e., event boundaries) on the memory for actors and the actions they performed. Undergraduate participants (N=121) from Florida Atlantic University viewed two different video clip set types of actors performing various actions. The continuous context (CC) video set type included four different actors performing actions in the same physical context. The discontinuous context (DC) video set type contained four actors, the first, second, and fourth actors shown in each set performed actions in the same physical context (e.g., a library), while the third actor in the set performed an action in a different physical context (e.g., a playground). After viewing the videos, memory for the actors and the actions was evaluated using the Person-Action-Conjunction (PAC) test in a retrieval session. Participants provided significantly more ‘yes’ responses to old item than to conjunction items at retrieval. No significant differences in the proportion of ‘yes’ were found between the CC video items and DC video items. These results could be due to the manipulation of physical context not being sufficiently strong to influence event segmentation.

Individuals are constantly being exposed to new information and new situations, but memory for these events is not always equal; understanding the factors that affect an individual’s ability to remember the details surrounding these events is extremely important. The purpose of the current study was to examine the potential effects of emotion and source characteristics, such as age and gender, on memory for factual information (i.e., trivia facts) and source identity (i.e., the sources of the information). One hundred and twenty-eight undergraduate students viewed a total of 120 videos depicting eight different sources (two young adult males, two young adult females, two older adult males, and two older adult females) presenting neutral and emotional (positive, negative) trivia facts; participants were then asked to complete a fill-in-thevi blank test on memory for trivia facts and a multiple-choice test on memory for the source of each fact. Results indicated that positively valenced trivia facts were remembered more often than both neutral and negatively valenced facts; emotion was not found to affect memory for the sources of trivia facts or memory for the relationship between trivia fact and source. Results indicated that trivia facts presented by female sources were remembered better than facts presented by male sources; source gender also affected memory for the sources of each fact, such that sources of facts presented by females were remembered better than the source identity for a fact presented by a male source. When the identity of the source was forgotten, participants were more likely to falsely attribute the fact to someone of the same age as the original source. If the original source was female, participants were also more likely to falsely attribute that fact to another female source compared to a male source, but if the original source was male, participants were equally likely to misattribute the source of either gender. The findings from the current study add to the current understanding of the complex effects of emotion on memory and suggest the importance

This research is a first step towards investigating the impact verbal descriptions can have on an individual’s memory for actors performing actions. Previous research has found that verbal descriptions of mugshot-esque, face stimuli can have either a facilitative or inhibitory effect on later recognition. The current study implemented the Person Action Conjunction (PAC) test, along with three separate groups where participants provided descriptions of actions, features of the actors, and holistic attributes of the actors. The results demonstrated that the description group impacted the attention placed on either the action or actor, causing participants to remember those described elements more. Furthermore, it was found that accurately recalling descriptions provided at encoding was significantly and positively correlated with recognition performance. Further research is necessary with different control conditions before an impact of verbal description on the memory for actors and actions can be known.

The hippocampus, a brain region that is part of the limbic system in the medial temporal lobe, is critical to episodic memory, or the memory of autobiographical events. The hippocampus plays an important role in the consolidation of information from short-term memory into more permanent long-term memory and spatial memory which enables navigation. Hippocampal damage in humans has been linked to memory loss, such as in Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, as well as in amnesia such as in the case of patient H.M. The role of the hippocampus has been well characterized in humans but is less understood in rodents due to contradictory findings. While rodents have served well as model organisms in developing our understanding of the cognitive map that is critical for spatial navigation, there has been substantial contention over the degree to which the rodent hippocampus supports non-spatial memory, specifically the memory for items or objects previously encountered. The overall objective of this research is to gain a better understanding of how neuronal circuits involving the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex function to support object memory in the brain. Chemogenetic technologies such as DREADDs (designer receptor exclusively activated by designer drugs) have proven to be effective tools in remote manipulation of neuronal activity. First, a series of behavioral tasks was used to validate the effects of DREADD inactivation in the CA1 region of dorsal hippocampus in C57BL/6J male mice. DREADD inhibition resulted in significant impairment in the spontaneous object recognition (SOR) task and of spatial memory in the Morris water maze. In conjunction, mice were implanted with bilateral perirhinal cortex guide cannulae to allow for temporary muscimol inactivation during distinct time points in the SOR task to further investigate the nature of its relationship with the hippocampus. The results reveal an unexpected role for the perirhinal cortex in the retrieval of strong object memory. Finally, Arc mRNA expression was quantified in CA1 of dorsal hippocampus and perirhinal cortex following both weak and strong object memory formation. The results indicate that the perirhinal cortex and hippocampus have distinct, yet complementary roles in object recognition memory and that distinction is gated by memory strength. Understanding the neural mechanisms supporting the weak-strong object memory distinction in mice is an important step not only in validating mice as a suitable model system to study episodic memory in humans, but also in developing treatments and understanding the underlying causes of diseases affecting long-term memory such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Previous research revealed that episodic memories are more likely to be consolidated if something novel occurs in relative temporal proximity to the original learned event (Dunsmoor, Murty, Davachi, & Phelps, 2015). Further, research conducted with rodents has revealed that novel contextual exposure following encoding of a spatial memory in a food-motivated task results in enhanced consolidation of that spatial memory (Takeuchi, Duszkiewics, Sonneborn et al., 2016). The present study sought to examine the influence of novel context exposure on non-spatial object memory in adult female and male C57BL/6J mice when novel context exposure follows encoding of object memory under two memory strength training protocols. Results revealed that regardless of memory strength or gender, subjects exposed to a novel context following encoding of object memory exhibited greater exploration of the novel object when assessed 23.5 h later. Thus, novel context exposure significantly enhanced the consolidation of recently encoded object memory. As novel context exposure has been shown to increase dopamine release in the hippocampus, these results are consistent with the theory of synaptic tag and capture, whereby activated dopaminergic afferents enhance the on-going consolidation of non-spatial object memory. Future studies will entail parsing potential neurotransmitter modulatory afferents via pharmacological antagonists.

This study addresses the state of scholarship regarding fantasy literature and questions the position of scholars who have dismissed it as panegyric. This study notes that no accepted definition of fantasy exists, sets forth its own, and questions the value of fantasy literature. Moving from definition, this study notes that fantasy literature limits artistic freedom by supplementing the reality principle of minimal distance in mimetic fiction with penemaximal distance. Penemaximal distance affords fantasy a great remove from the actual world but adds the generic megatext as a frame of reference that defines reality. This allows fantasy literature to create semantic and episodic memory of diegetic worlds no longer limited by actual world foreknowledge and perception. Engaging narrative and cognitive theory, this study argues that authors utilize semantic memory to work within established truths of the genre, and readers hold authors to those rules unless authorial justification merits revision of generic epistemology. By maintaining a link to semantic memory (truth), fantasy texts create belief in the diegesis through an acceptance of affective and cognitive significance. An examination of Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao notes the control of the reader's semantic memory in the catalogue presented following the text that forces a reconsideration of the assumptions made by the reader. This leads to a discussion of the reader's necessity regarding diegetic creation. Brandon Sanderson's The Emperor's Soul is engaged as a metacomment on writing fantasy and links the protagonist, Shai, to the author through plot and position regarding world-building and the creation of episodic memory that alters the reader in the actual world. Lastly, Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is positioned as fantasy that satirizes generic expectations and confronts reader assumptions in the diegesis, leading to episodic memory of a meritocratic world and actual world demystification. Gary Wolfe posits the idea of deeper belief, where experiences within the text become virtual analogues for actual world experiences, and this study argues this moment as the creation of episodic memory. This is one value of fantasy literature; the memory of experiencing worlds not limited by empirical perception.

Many Days Many Nights is a body of work that examines the notion of place, highlighting the complex relationship between a psychological state of mind and the experience of geographical location. The work incorporates a hybrid documentary photography practice combined with experimental video to construct narrative and is underpinned by a phenomenological inquiry into the relationship between memory, time, and the experience of place, and collectively, how these concepts pervade the subjective photographic frame.

In Into Memory, memory is no longer something which resides in the past. Instead, it is a substance which can be extracted and consumed like a hallucinogenic drug, immersing consumers in a vivid and immediate past whose physical effects linger long after the images of that memory disappear. For Paul Mendez, these memories offer an escape from a present defined by grief, while former professional football prospect Calvin Long seeks to reconnect with a past too long stained by regret. For law school student Kara Douglas, selling erotic memories is simply a business transaction—that is until she considers removing the parts of her past that stand in the way of the future she desires. Set in the rolling hills of contemporary Tallahassee, Into Memory explores the relationships that we maintain, for better or worse, with our pasts and what we will do to avoid, restore, or change them.