Memory

Uncounted Cadences is a drawing installation in the thesis exhibition that furthers my exploration in tracing movement through psychological and physical geographies. Gestural drawings of human and animal bodies in motion are woven into local landscape imagery that is printed with powdered charcoal through a silkscreen. Using both additive and subtractive processes, the layering and erasure suggest loss, reclamation, and the nature of memory. The drawings are cut and provisionally reassembled into a cinematic sequence as if they are pieces of film being edited and spliced. This process shows an unfolding over time and involves listening to the rhythmic pacing of bodies morphing, decaying, birthing, or leaving. Time is not experienced as progress ; rather, the rearrangement of fragments allows for a continuous retelling of stories.

Research shows that bilingualism confers substantial cognitive benefits in children and the elderly. Bilingual advantages on nonverbal working memory, updating, shifting and inhibition tasks are widely reported. However, advantages are not always observed in young adults. These disparities may be due to varied proficiency levels and task types (verbal versus nonverbal) administered. This study sought to detect bilingual performance advantages on executive function and working memory tasks (verbal and nonverbal working memory, updating, shifting and inhibition tasks) between groups of 37 high and 37 low proficiency Spanish-English bilingual and 40 English monolingual young adults. ... Young adulthood may represent a lull during which bilingualism does not confer cognitive advantages for functions examined.

Male C7BL/6J mice were implanted with bilateral dorsal CA1 guide cannulae. After confirming that intrahippocampal microinfusion of muscimol impaired hippocampal function, demonstrated by impaired performance in the Morris water maze, the influence of intrahippocampal muscimol was tested in the Novel Object Recognition paradigm. During a test session 24 h after the last habituation/sample session, mice were presented with one familiar object and one novel object. Successful retention of object memory was inferred if mice spent more time exploring the novel object than the familiar object. Results demonstrate that muscimol infused into dorsal CA1 region prior to the test session eliminates novel object preference, indicating that the hippocampus is necessary for the retrieval of this non-spatial memory - a topic that has garnered much debate. Understanding the similarities between rodent and human hippocampal function could enable future animal studies to effectively answer questions about diseases and disorders affecting human learning and memory.

Prospective memory is remembering to perform an action in the future, such as attending a meeting (a time-based task) or picking up milk at the gas station (an eventbased task), and is crucial to achieving goal-directed activities in everyday life. Children who fail to develop prospective memory abilities are likely to experience difficulties interacting with parents, teachers, and peers. To date, research on prospective memory development has been primarily descriptive or focused on underlying executive functioning. This dissertation investigated the developmental relationship between metacognitive representation and prospective memory in preschool and elementary school children and adults. Findings from Study 1 indicated that individual differences in representational ability independently predicted individual differences in 3-year-olds' performance on event-based tasks that are of low-interest. Qualitative changes are important to consider when modeling prospective memory develop ment, as with episodic memory. Study 2 presents findings based on a study using the CyberCruiser 2.0, an Xbox-style racing game designed to assess time-based prospective memory. This study confirmed that kindergarten children are capable of completing this time-based prospective memory task but revealed that performance improved with age. Between kindergarten and 2nd grade, children become better aware of their own mental processes and abilities, allowing them to adjust their strategies and perform more comparable to adults. As a result, in this study, younger children tended to overestimate their prospective memory abilities and were less likely to monitor passing time, causing them to fail more time-based task trials than older children and adults.

This thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of the Western representation of the Kosovo conflict and its resolution in the year 1999. By reviewing political, scholarly and media rhetoric, the thesis examines how the dominant narrative of "genocide in Kosovo" was created in Western discourse, arguing that it gained its persuasive force from the legacy of the collective memory of the Holocaust. Using the framework of Kenneth Burke's theory of Dramatism and Walter Fisher's theory of the narrative paradigm, this thesis aims to understand how language, analogy and collective memory function in rhetoric to shape audience perceptions and guide political and military action. The study illustrates the mechanics of the operating rhetoric by analyzing two primary sources, the rhetoric of U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

This experiment was designed to investigate the effect of emotion on an individual's ability to bind actors and actions in memories for events. Binding is the process of creating associations among features of a stimulus in order to represent that they belong together; however, errors can occur when a feature from one stimulus is incorrectly associated with a feature from another stimulus. Participants viewed a series of video clips, each depicting an actor performing a simple emotional or non-emotional action. One week later, they viewed a series of retrieval video clips consisting of old, (previously seen), conjunction (previously seen action performed by a different actor) and also new video clips. Participants responded "yes" to viewing the old clips the most, followed by both conjunction clips, and then new clips. Participants also responded "yes" more often to emotional items and also displayed higher confidence ratings to "yes" responses for emotional items.

Small conductance calcium-activated potassium (SK) channels are found ubiquitously throughout the brain and modulate the encoding of learning and memory. Systemic injection of 1-ethyl-2-benzimidalzolinoe (EBIO), a SK channel activator, impairs the encoding of novel object memory and locomotion but spares fear memory encoding in C57BL/6NHsd mice. The memory impairments discovered were not due to non-cognitive performance confounds such as ataxia, anxiety, attention or analgesia. Further investigation with intra-hippocampal application of EBIO revealed SK channels in dorsal CA1 contribute to the encoding deficits seen systemically, but do not account for the full extent of the impairment. Concentrated activation of dorsal CA1 SK channels do not influence fear memory encoding or locomotor impairments. Taken together, these data indicate SK channels, especially in the dorsal hippocampus, have a modulatory role on novel object memory encoding, but not retrieval; however, pharmacological activation of hippocampal SK channels does not appear to influence fear memory encoding.

This experiment investigated an individual's memory of specific motion events, unique actor, intrinsic motion, and extrinsic motion combination. Intrinsic motions involve the movement of an individual's body parts in a specific manner to move around, while extrinsic motions specify a path in reference to an external object. Participants viewed video clips, each depicting an actor performing a unique extrinsic and intrinsic motion combination. One week later, they viewed a different series of retrieval video clips consisting of old (identical to encoding), extrinsic conjunction (extrinsic motion previously performed by different actor), intrinsic conjunction (intrinsic motion previously performed by different actor), and new (novel extrinsic or intrinsic motion) video clips. Participants responded "yes" to viewing the old video clips the most often, followed by conjunction video clips, and then new video clips. Furthermore, there were a greater number of "yes" event memory recognition responses for extrinsic conjunction items than intrinsic conjunction items.