M T Lechuga | PubMed Health

PubMed2005

Old-fashioned responses in an updating memory task.

Errors in a running memory task are analysed. Participants were presented with a variable-length list of items and were asked to report the last four items. It has been proposed (Morris & Jones, 1990) that this task requires two mechanisms: the temporal storage of the target set by the articulatory loop and its updating by the central executive. Two implicit assumptions in this proposal are (a) the preservation of serial order, and (b) participants' capacity to discard earlier items from the target subset as list presentation is running, and new items are appended. Order preservation within the updated target list and the inhibition of the outdated list items should imply a relatively higher rate of location errors for items from the medial positions of the target list and a lower rate of intrusion errors from the outdated and inhibited items from the pretarget positions. Contrary to these expectations, for both consonants (Experiment 1) and words (Experiment 2) we found recency effects and a relatively high rate of intrusions from the final pretarget positions, most of them from the very last. Similar effects were apparent with the embedded four-item lists for catch trials. These results are clearly at odds with the presumed updating by the central executive.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Episodic recall of specifics and generalisation coexist in 25-month-old children.

It is clear that children generalise their knowledge of events from one instantiation to another. The means by which generalisation is accomplished are unclear. In three experiments, we used elicited imitation of multi-step sequences to test whether 25-month-olds' generalisation occurs as a function of forgetting of the features of the original event. Experiment 1 was an initial test of generalisation from one version of an event to another version involving perceptually different yet functionally analogous props. After a 1-week delay, children showed evidence of generalisation by enacting the event using the analogous props. Experiment 2 was a within-subject test of generalisation and memory for the original version of an event. After a 1-week delay, when paired with unrelated distractor props, analogous props served as effective retrieval cues; when paired with the original props, analogous props were treated as functionally equivalent to unrelated distractors. This within-subject reversal in the functional role of analogous props is compelling evidence that children's event representations include specific features and, at the same time, are generalisable. In Experiment 3, children showed evidence of generalisation immediately after exposure to an event, thereby making clear that generalisation occurs even in the face of robust memory for the specific features of the original event.

Analysis of Variance↗