Kersten, Alan

Everyday individuals experience problems in accurately remembering who did what in an event. In order to have an accurate memory for an event of this type, an individual needs to remember the person who performed the action, the action itself, and the pairing of these two pieces of information. If these pieces of information are not bound together correctly, the end result is an inaccurate memory for an event. This study examined the ability of young and older adults to bind people and their actions together in memory. Though both age groups were more likely to falsely recognize novel combinations of familiar actors and actions than they were to falsely recognize novel actions, the older participants were even more likely to falsely recognize these novel combinations. The misbinding of actors and actions may thus contribute to the problem of mistaken eyewitness identification.

Insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) is a metabolic disorder arising from pancreatic dysfunction. For survival, a diabetic must rely upon an exogenous source of insulin to ensure cellular health. Hypoglycemia is a condition that may arise in IDDM patients in which more insulin than glucose is present in the body. Chronic, severe occurrences of this condition have been speculated to incur memory impairment in diabetics. This experiment sought to determine if diabetics performed differently from a non-diabetic population on a delayed matching memory task, and also if those diabetics experiencing hypoglycemia performed more poorly than other diabetics on this task. It was found that IDDM patients do not perform differently from non-diabetics on a matching task, and most diabetics did not perform more poorly than other patients on the same task. One diabetic experiencing severe, chronic hypoglycemia performed more poorly than other experiment participants, suggesting that hypoglycemia may, in fact, be related to memory impairment on this delayed matching task.