PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

T Helstrup

Publications and source records attributed to T Helstrup.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

Concurrent and retroactive interference effects in memory of movement patterns.

Three experiments examined memory for enacted and observed movement patterns. The effect of visuo-spatial tracing tasks requiring overt motor movements, comparable to those required by the to-be-recalled movement pattern task when enacted, were compared with the effects of non-motor interference tasks, such as articulatory suppression and counting backwards. None of the experiments was able to detect indices of motor mechanisms in memory of movement patterns. The results are discussed in terms of theories of action memory and working memory and of a problem-solving account.

Humans↗

Pop-out into memory: a retrieval mechanism that is enhanced with the recall of subject-performed tasks.

Subject-performed tasks (SPTs; i.e., carrying out the actions during study) improve free recall of action phrases without enhancing relational information. By this mechanism, items pop into a person's mind without active search, and this process especially extends the recency effect. The authors demonstrated the existence of the extended recency effect and its importance for the SPT recall advantage (Experiments 1 and 2). Carrying out the action and not semantic processing caused the effect (Experiment 3). The extended recency effect was also not a consequence of a deliberate last-in, first-out strategy (Experiment 4), and performing a difficult secondary task (an arithmetic task) during recall reduced memory performances but did not influence the extended recency effect (Experiment 5). These data support the theory that performing actions during study enhances the efficiency of an automatic pop-out mechanism in free recall.

Adult↗

The effect of strategies and contexts on memory for movement patterns.

Two experiments on memory for movement patterns examined possible motor aspects of this memory type. None of the experiments found any evidence for motor effects. The first experiment showed lower memory with induced motor strategies than with any of the other induced strategies. The second experiment demonstrated stronger context effects under retrieval than under encoding conditions. The results are discussed in terms of functional and structural conceptions of episodic short-term memory of motor information.

Female↗

Do you remember what you imagined you would do in that place? The motor encoding cue-failure effect in sighted and blind people.

Three experiments examine why the recall of performed actions often fails to profit from provision of retrieval context. A cue failure has, for instance, been demonstrated with cued recall for performed actions in that cued recall is lower than free recall, whereas control conditions show the usual free to cued recall increase for non-enacted material. The first experiment confirms the cue-failure effect and extends the generality of the finding to everyday cue contexts (where the cues are represented by images of the locations associated to the actions), which intuitively should be of general retrieval help. The second experiment shows that the cue-failure effect is also present, even to a greater extent, in congenitally totally blind people; the third experiment suggests how the cue-failure effect may be defeated by means of simultaneous motor and non-motor encoding. The results are discussed in terms of strategic and non-strategic conceptions of action memory and of the independence of motor and visuospatial codes. This independence appears maintained also in the blind.

Adolescent↗

Visual discovery in mind and on paper.

The effectiveness of mental imagery with and without drawing support (perceptual assistance) in the visual synthesis of novel patterns was studied in three experiments. When the task was to create one recognizable pattern from three simple shapes in a 2-min assembly period, subjects were as likely to produce a recognizable or creative pattern per trial whether mental imagery was augmented by external drawing support or not. When the task was to create as many patterns as possible in a 3-min assembly period, more patterns were produced per trial with external drawing support than without; however, neither the recognizability nor the creativity of the patterns differed. Differences in performance in the visual synthesis task with and without external drawing support are interpreted in terms of limited cognitive resources.

Adult↗

Loci for act recall: contextual influence on the processing of action events.

A problem-solving account of act memory predicts stronger impacts of context than theories that explain act memory by reference to automatic processing or by reference to the operation of modality-specific code systems. This prediction was tested in three experiments, all using the loci memotechnique to provide contexts for memorization of subject-performed tasks (SPTs). The results of the three experiments did not provide unambiguous evidence for or against any of the rival theories. Most consistent, however, was the observation that memory under motor-encoding conditions profits less on contexts than memory under nonmotor-encoding conditions, a finding which by itself lends more support to a multicode than to a problem-solving interpretation.

Adolescent↗