Memory最新文献

Music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) are typically elicited by music that listeners have heard before. While studies that have directly manipulated music familiarity show that familiar music evokes more MEAMs than music listeners have not heard before, music that is unfamiliar to the listener can also sporadically cue autobiographical memory. Here we examined whether music that sounds familiar even without previous exposure can produce spontaneous MEAMs. Cognitively healthy older adults (N = 75, ages 65-80 years) listened to music clips that were chosen by researchers to be either familiar or unfamiliar (i.e., varying by prior exposure). Participants then disclosed whether the clip elicited a MEAM and later provided self-reported familiarity ratings for each. Self-reported familiarity was positively associated with the occurrence of MEAMs in response to familiar, but not the unfamiliar, music. The likelihood of reporting MEAMs for music released during youth (i.e., the "reminiscence bump") relative to young adulthood (20-25 years) included both music released during participants' adolescence (14-18 years) and middle childhood (5-9 years) once self-reported familiarity was accounted for. These developmental effects could not be accounted for by music-evoked affect. Overall, our results suggest that the phenomenon of MEAMs hinges upon both perceptions of familiarity and prior exposure.

ABSTRACTPersistent negative emotions are a key post-traumatic stress (PTS) symptom. Disgust occurs during/following traumatic events and predicts PTS symptoms, but is overlooked relative to other negative emotions like fear. Here, we investigate how trauma-related disgust fades-or persists-in memory (i.e., a person's recollection of how they felt during a traumatic event vs. their current feelings), and over time, relative to fear. In a cross-sectional (Study 1; N = 471) and longitudinal (Study 2; N = 160) study, participants rated their disgust and fear reactions to a recent stressful/traumatic event, at the time the event occurred (peritraumatic; "then") and at present (posttraumatic; "now"). Study 2 participants provided additional "now" emotion ratings 3 months later. Cross-sectional comparisons showed that whilst participants' disgust and fear reactions were lower in intensity "now" relative to "then", fear faded to a greater degree than disgust. Time since the traumatic event and PTS symptom severity were not related to disgust's relative persistence. In contrast, disgust and fear similarly persisted longitudinally. We conclude disgust and fear similarly persist over time, but disgust persists in memory more than fear. Understanding how to reduce feelings of disgust following trauma is clinically important, since disgust is more resistant to PTSD treatments than fear.

Many witnesses are intoxicated at crime scenes, yet little is known of their ability to accurately describe perpetrators to police. We therefore explored the impact of alcohol on delayed verbal face recall across two experiments. Participants were administered an alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage prior to viewing either one or two unfamiliar female faces, which they described from memory the following day while in a sober state. Each to-be-remembered model had long hair worn either loose (i.e., visible), or tied behind the head (i.e., concealed). Testing the hypothesis that alcohol narrows the focus of attention to the external (hairstyle) region of faces, we expected intoxicated participants to have poorer memory of internal face features (eyes, nose, mouth) than sober controls for stimulus faces with visibly long hair. Results revealed poorer recall accuracy for internal face details following alcohol consumption (Exp. 2), but the effect was uninfluenced by hairstyle. Findings are therefore consistent with the more general view that alcohol is associated with a bias to the external (hairstyle) region of faces during face learning, irrespective of hair visibility.

Previous research has revealed enhanced free recall for neutral items previously associated with disease-causing agents, compared to when they are associated with neutral information; this has been termed the contamination effect. However, it remains unknown whether this effect extends to recognition memory and, if so, on what processes it would rely (i.e., recollection or familiarity). This is a relevant question to establish the generality and enrich our knowledge about the effect on the various processes in which memory operates. We employed a Yes/No recognition task with Remember/Know judgments to assess the recognition experience. Online American (Experiment 1) and in-person Portuguese (Experiment 2) samples were used. Furthermore, in Experiment 2, participants responded to a Health Status questionnaire and the Fear of COVID-19 scale, allowing us to explore the relation of the effect with these individual variables. In both experiments, the results revealed that objects were significantly better recognised after having been previously associated with sick faces than with healthy faces. Moreover, participants assigned a higher proportion of Remember-judgments to contaminated (vs. non-contaminated) objects, suggesting these were retained with more contextual information. Exploratory analyses revealed that participants' illness recency correlated positively with the proportion of Remember-judgments. The robustness of this effect is supported by its replication among participants from two different countries, employing both online and on-site procedures. Notably, the to-be-recognised objects were the same across conditions, preventing possible item-selection concerns. Overall, this study expands our understanding of the impact of contamination on memory, emphasising its role in disease avoidance.

Despite the crucial role that the recall of autobiographical memories (AMs) plays for identity, the process of how we recall AMs, and whether retrieval processes undergo changes across the lifespan, has received little attention. The present study thus examined the order of AMs during recall, with a specific focus on time and centrality as guiding dimensions. A total of 364 participants (aged 18-89 years) recalled up to ten positive and negative AMs. They provided their age at the time of the event and rated AMs according to their centrality to identity and life story. Based on linear growth models, we found emotional AMs to be recalled chronologically. Additionally, people ordered their emotional AMs along their relative importance. Notably, both order effects vary across age: Whereas the chronological order effect became more pronounced with increasing age, the reversed pattern was found regarding the centrality order effect for negative AMs. Positive AMs were also ordered according to their centrality, but the strength of this effect was independent of participants' age. Findings are discussed in terms of potential motivational factors underlying the retrieval mechanisms associated with the recall of positive and negative AMs and age-related differences therein.

This study, involving 34 Malaysian adults, investigated if the memory of cultural life script congruent and incongruent events was better than life script neutral events. We created a 1500-word hypothetical life story of a Malaysian girl comprising six life script congruent, six life script incongruent, and six life script neutral events. Half of those events were high-frequent, and half were low-frequent life script events. Participants first read the story on a computer screen and then completed a free recall test ten minutes later and again one week later. They recalled as many details as they could from the 18 events presented in the story. The results revealed that participants retrieved more information from the life script incongruent events than from life script congruent events at both recall points. The memory for high-frequent life script events was better than for low-frequent and life script-neutral events. Overall, the recall rate was higher in the immediate than in the late phase. The results confirm the isolation effects or Von Restorff effect, which predicts that unusual and distinctive events are more memorable than typical, commonly expected events.

False memories during testimony are an enormous challenge for criminal trials. Exposure to post-event misinformation can lead to inadvertent creation of false memories, known as the misinformation effect. We investigated anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL) during recall testing to enhance accurate recall while addressing the misinformation effect. Participants (N = 60) watched a television series depicting a fictional terrorist attack, then received an audio recording with misinformation, consistent information, and control information. During cued recall testing, participants received anodal or sham tDCS. Results revealed a robust misinformation effect in both groups, with participants falsely recalling on average 26.6% of the misinformed items. Bayesian statistics indicated substantial evidence in favour of the null hypothesis that there was no difference between groups in the misinformation effect. Regarding correct recall however, the anodal group exhibited significantly improved recall for items from the original video. Together, these results demonstrate that anodal tDCS of the left IPL enhances correct recall of the episodes from the original event without affecting false recall of misinformation. The findings support the IPL's role in recollection and source attribution of episodic memories.

Prior work has shown Americans have higher levels of memory specificity than East Asians. Neuroimaging studies have not investigated mechanisms that account for cultural differences at retrieval. In this study, we use fMRI to assess whether mnemonic discrimination, distinguishing novel from previously encountered stimuli, accounts for cultural differences in memory. Fifty-five American and 55 Taiwanese young adults completed an object recognition paradigm testing discrimination of old targets, similar lures and novel foils. Mnemonic discrimination was tested by comparing discrimination of similar lures from studied targets, and results showed the relationship between activity in right fusiform gyrus and behavioural discrimination between target and lure objects differed across cultural groups. Parametric modulation analyses of activity during lure correct rejections also indicated that groups differed in left superior parietal cortex response to variations in lure similarity. Additional analyses of old vs. new activity indicated that Americans and Taiwanese differ in the neural activity supporting general object recognition in the hippocampus, left inferior frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus. Results are juxtaposed against comparisons of the regions activated in common across the two cultures. Overall, Americans and Taiwanese differ in the extent to which they recruit visual processing and attention modulating brain regions.

True and false memories recruit a number of shared brain regions; however, they are not completely overlapping. Extensive sex differences have been identified in the brain during true memories and, recently, we identified sex differences in the brain during false memories. In the current fMRI study, we sought to determine whether sex differences existed in the location and extent of overlap between true and false memories. True and false memories activated a number of shared brain regions. Compared to females, males produced a greater number of overlapping brain regions (8 versus 2 activations for males and females, respectively) including the prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and early/late visual processing cortices (including V1) in males and prefrontal and parietal cortices in females. Males had significantly higher similarity between true and false memory activation maps, revealed by our novel multi-voxel pattern correlation analysis. Moreover, higher similarity between true and false memory activation maps was associated with higher false memory rates. The current results suggest that true and false memories are more similar in males than females. The significant brain-behavior relationship also suggests that males may be more susceptible to false memory errors due to their highly similar true memory-false memory cortical representations.