Memory & Cognition最新文献

Creative thinking is a complex, higher-order ability that draws on multiple cognitive systems. However, the contribution of specific semantic control processes to creativity remains unclear. The current study had two goals: First, we investigated how individual differences in semantic knowledge and control contribute to divergent and convergent styles of creative thinking, beyond the involvement of domain-general executive functions. Second, we explored whether there were age-related differences in semantic and executive abilities, and if these differences influenced the ability to think creatively. Specifically, we examined the role of the two components of semantic control: controlled retrieval and semantic selection. In our study, 63 younger adults and 64 older adults completed semantic, executive, and creative thinking measures. Younger adults demonstrated better executive functioning, while older adults exhibited superior semantic knowledge, controlled retrieval, and convergent thinking abilities. Crucially, there were no age differences across several divergent thinking metrics: automated originality scoring, human ratings, or uniqueness. Regression analyses indicated that semantic knowledge and updating executive ability influenced convergent thinking abilities across both age groups. In contrast, semantic control abilities were predictive of divergent thinking skills, but only in the younger group. Our results emphasize the key role of the semantic system in creative thought, and, critically, indicate that divergent and convergent thinking may rely on different aspects of semantic cognition. Moreover, the recruitment of these abilities varies across the lifespan, in line with increased knowledge reserves and declines in executive control seen in older adults.

How do we interpret a lightbulb above a head in visual images to mean inspiration? We investigated the semantic processing of these "upfixes" like lightbulbs or gears that float above characters' heads. We examined the congruity of face-upfix dyads presented sequentially with words describing their literal ("lightbulb") or non-literal meanings ("inspiration"). To examine if upfixes alone sponsor meanings, we showed participants upfixes that either matched or mismatched the facial expression (e.g., lightbulb over an excited vs. sad face). Literal words always evoked faster response times for face-upfix dyads when presented before the images. When images appeared before words, participants responded faster to non-literal words for matching dyads than mismatching dyads. On the other hand, when literal words appeared before images, participants responded faster to matching dyads than mismatching dyads. Non-literal words were rated as more congruous with matching dyads, while literal words were more congruous with mismatching dyads. Thus, non-literal upfix meanings (e.g., inspiration) are ingrained in memory only when they match facial expressions, supporting the notion that they belong to a constrained visual lexicon. Our study contributes a combinatorial method of both verbal and visual modalities into the study of non-literal expressions in memory.

Evidence for two qualitatively different learning strategies has emerged from the function- and category-learning literatures: a rule-based and an exemplar-based strategy. With a rule-based strategy, learners abstract some common principle from training items, which allows extrapolation to novel instances. With an exemplar-based strategy, learners encode training items without abstraction, which facilitates generalisation based on surface similarity to trained items. Previous studies offer preliminary evidence that strategies are stable; that is, convergent performance was found across pairs of disparate tasks. The current paper advances this work by examining whether performance across a battery of tasks converges, providing evidence for a latent variable underlying learning strategy. Subjects completed five learning strategy and three working memory tasks. Using data reduction and latent structure modelling methods, we found evidence for a general strategy construct that was unrelated to working memory. This is important because it shows that differences in learning strategy are not simply due to differences in working memory.

To examine the roles of change detection and repetition detection in visual working memory, we analyzed three working memory tests expected to rely differentially on these processes. Subjects studied an array of colored squares and then completed three tests. In the complex-probe test, subjects indicated whether a test array matched the study array or if an item's color changed. In the single-probe test, they judged whether a single item's color matched the study color, and in the item recognition test, they identified whether a centrally presented color was studied. We collected same/different confidence responses and analyzed receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) to evaluate memory strength distributions for changed and repeated trials, using a mixture signal detection model to estimate each process. As expected, the complex-probe test showed more high-confidence memory for changed trials, while the item recognition test showed more high-confidence memory for repetitions. The single-probe test showed similar or lower-confidence memory for both trials. Moreover, model estimates indicated that the probability of recollecting a change was higher in the complex-probe than in the item recognition tests, and the probability of recollecting a repetition was higher in the item recognition than the complex-probe tests. The single-probe test showed moderate recollection for both. These results show that change detection and repetition detection are functionally dissociable, with test-type affecting their contributions to working memory. These findings have implications for studying populations, such as aging, that may exhibit impairments in one or the other and raise the question of whether different neural systems underlie these processes.

This study was designed to investigate the effects of aging in episodic memory and future-time perspective. More specifically, we investigated the impact of grandchildren at encoding on future-time perspective and free recall in older adults. We asked younger and older adults to imagine being stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land without any basic survival items, and to consider either their personal survival or (older adults only) that of their grandchildren. Among the older adults, compared with a pleasantness (control) condition, a survival processing advantage was observed in the grandchild-survival condition, which differed reliably from the personal-survival condition. Furthermore, encouraging the older participants to think about their grandchildren eliminated the differences between older and younger adults on future-time perspective. Having grandchildren seems to serve an adaptive function in old age. Their presence enhances memory performance and seems to enable older adults to cope with their limited life perspective. In line with motivational theories of aging, these results provide valuable insights, opening up new perspectives on the prioritization of goals by older adults and the underlying reasons, including emotional meaning and adaptive purpose.

The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of working memory overload on emotional processing and recognition memory. Firstly, to study emotional processing, subjective and fNIRS correlates were measured while inducing emotions using affective pictures presented for 6 s. A recognition memory task was then administered, in which participants were required to indicate whether each affective stimulus was new or had previously been used in the passive viewing task. A sample of 70 healthy volunteers (44 women) were divided into an experimental group in which working memory was overloaded during the emotion induction procedure, and a control group in which working memory was not overloaded. Regarding the effect of working memory overload on emotional processing, the results showed that the experimental group rated negative stimuli as less unpleasant. Additionally, this group presented higher fNIRS activations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), particularly to high arousal stimuli. Meanwhile, the findings revealed better recognition for negative and high arousal stimuli in the experimental group. Overall, our findings provide further evidence on the modulation of emotional processing and recognition memory as a function of working memory overload, while highlighting the importance of the DLPFC in emotion processing and cognitive load management.

Study events that are congruent with our prior expectations are better remembered than expectation-unrelated events. Paradoxically, events that are highly incongruent with expectations are also better remembered. In this study, we explore whether this paradoxical finding persists in object featural memory. Specifically, we examine whether memory for expectation-congruent and incongruent features of objects is differentially impacted by the processes that underlie recall and recognition and the types of information being probed. In three experiments, we manipulated the degree to which object features adhered to people's prior expectations (i.e., colors of objects) and then assessed memory (recall and recognition) for expectation-relevant features (i.e., object-color) and expectation-irrelevant features (i.e., object-shape). While both expectation-congruent and incongruent features were equally well recognized, only expectation-congruent features were better recalled compared to expectation-unrelated features. Furthermore, only strong expectation-congruence created a memory advantage for expectation-irrelevant object features. These findings suggest that in object featural memory, expectation-congruence and incongruence are qualitatively dissociable in their impact on recognition and recall processes. The findings from this work have important implications for cognitive and neuroscientific theories of how prior expectations shape the representation of objects and their constituent features in episodic memory.

Although listeners may have the competence to engage in a word-by-word analysis to build a syntactic representation of a heard sentence, in everyday conversation, listeners may, almost by necessity, process the sentence only to a shallow or "good enough" level to derive its meaning. The possibility has been raised that processing schemata may be flexible, such that under some circumstances, comprehension decisions are more likely to be based on an incomplete analysis. We report two experiments in which adult participants were tested on their ability to determine the meaning of auditorily presented plausible or implausible sentences. In both experiments, participants were given two different orienting instructions while completing the listening task (instructions that emphasized either the speed or accuracy of the comprehension decision). In Experiment 1, we also manipulated spectral clarity such that speech was either heard clearly or degraded in spectral richness. A unique use of hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling was employed to probe latent decision-making processes that influenced the participants' comprehension decision. Results indicate that orienting instructions that emphasize speed and perceptual challenge both increase the likelihood that the assumed meaning of implausible sentences will be based on plausibility. Drift-diffusion modeling revealed a dissociation where orienting instructions selectively influenced the amount of evidence required for the participant to make a comprehension decision while sentence plausibility selectively influenced the rate of evidence accumulation. These drift-diffusion model findings were replicated in Experiment 2. Results suggest that comprehension processes are highly flexible and can be characterized in terms of underlying decision-making mechanisms.

The decision-making processes involved in relying on an external source (cognitive offloading) for memory retrieval tasks have been discussed in numerous publications. The nature of original learning strategies could be an important contributing factor to the decision to offload but is unexamined. In this study we used a paired-associate learning task to investigate the influences of mnemonic (associative) and rote learning strategies on the likelihood of opting out, either by offloading or omitting a response. Further, we investigated the ways that certain outcome variables (specifically, the number of opt-out responses and amount of time spent studying) may in fact influence the relationship between learning strategy and decisions to persist in effortful search. We also investigated the degree to which any effects of learning strategy are specific to either offloading or omission decisions. Overall, we found a mnemonic learning effect of decreased frequency of general opt-out decisions relative to the rote group. Further, we found that mnemonic learning led to longer internal search times prior to opt-out responses, suggesting additional, intentional search processes such as trying to retrieve the original mnemonic, to help recover the response word. A partial mediation of the learning strategy effect on omission latency by performance factors suggested the learning strategy effect affects omission latency independently. Finally, relative to the rote learning strategy, the mnemonic strategy led to fewer instances of offloading, and longer decision latencies for omission responses.

Humans have long used external resources to overcome limitations of internal memory. However, experimental research investigating the efficacy of these strategies has emerged relatively recently. Given the rapidly growing interest in this topic, we conducted two meta-analyses to answer key questions regarding the effects of cognitive offloading - the use of physical action to reduce internal cognitive demand - on the performance of memory-based tasks. A meta-analysis of mean differences revealed that the benefit of offloading is greater for forced- compared to choice-offloading conditions and within- compared to between-subject designs. A meta-analysis of variance found that cognitive offloading reduces interindividual variability in the performance of memory-based tasks and that the reduction is greater for adults compared to children, for forced- compared to choice-offloading conditions, and for prospective compared to retrospective memory tasks. Study modality was not a significant moderator in either analysis. We discuss the applied, theoretical, and methodological implications of these findings.