Collaborative encoding with a new categorization task: a contribution to collaborative memory research.

Collaborative memory research has focused primarily on the effects of collaboration at recall with collaboration during encoding receiving less attention. In the present study, collaboration was investigated both at encoding and at retrieval to determine its effects and possible interactions. The aim was to clarify whether the collaborative inhibition effect depended on whether the encoding was with the same or with a different partner. A total of 320 participants (160 Italian and 160 Spanish undergraduate students) were administered a modified version of the collaborative memory paradigm with a new categorization task of verbal affective stimuli at encoding. Specifically, they were asked to classify 90 printed words into 6 categories, so as to have 15 words in each category and then did two recall tasks. Participants were assigned to one of five possible conditions according to encoding (collaborative, individual) and recall (collaborative with the same partner, with another partner, and individual). Results show a collaborative encoding deficit and the classic collaborative inhibition effect independently of whether the encoding was collaborative or individual and even in a collaborative recall group that showed a degree of recall output organization comparable to that of the individual recall group. These results are not wholly consistent with a retrieval disruption explanation and are discussed according to divided attention during collaborative recall and how it may contribute to the collaborative inhibition effect.

Colored valence in a lexical decision task.

Color influences behavior, from the simplest to the most complex, through controlled and more automatic information elaboration processes. Nonetheless, little is known about how and when these highly interconnected processes interact. This study investigates the interaction between controlled and automatic processes during the processing of color information in a lexical decision task. Participants discriminated stimuli presented in different colors (red, blue, green) as words or pseudowords. Results showed that while color did not affect the faster and more accurate recognition of words compared to pseudowords, performance was influenced when examining words and pseudowords separately. Pseudowords were recognized faster when presented in blue or red, suggesting a potential influence of evolutionary color preferences when processing is not guided by more controlled processes. With words, emotional enhancement effects were found, with a preference for green independent of valence. These results suggest that controlled and more automatic processes do interact when processing color information according to stimulus type and task.

Metacognition in working memory: Confidence judgments during an n-back task.

Metacognition in working memory (WM) has received less attention than episodic memory, and few studies have investigated confidence judgements while carrying out a verbal WM task. The present study investigated whether individuals are aware of their own level of performance while carrying out an ongoing verbal WM task, and whether judgments of confidence are sensitive to factors that determine WM performance. A verbal n-back task was adapted to obtain confidence judgments on a trial-by-trial basis. Memory load and lure interference were manipulated. Results showed that metacognition judgments were affected by memory load and levels of interference just as performance accuracy. Even when judgments were sensitive to memory factors, participants were overconfident and generally showed poor metacognitive accuracy at discriminating between erroneous and accurate responses. Results are discussed in terms of possible cues contributing to metacognitive judgements during an ongoing WM task and reasons for WM metacognitive accuracy.

Novel Approaches to Memory and Aging: The Editorial.

Heightened average life expectancy, which is increasing the number of older adults destined to live alone in the future, is forcing society to acknowledge the strong positive correlation between health costs and age [...].

Development and Validation of a Short Form of the Geriatric Anxiety Scale (GAS-12) among Italian Older Adults.

OBJECTIVES: We developed a new Italian short version of the Geriatric Anxiety Scale (GAS-12) and evaluated its psychometric properties. The GAS-12 specifically screens for anxiety symptoms in the Italian older adult population by identifying items that best discriminate anxiety in this population. METHODS: In Study 1, we administered the full-length Italian translation of the GAS to 517 older adults and used item response theory to identify the most discriminating items and to develop the short form used in Study 2. In Study 2, we evaluated the functioning of the new short form of the questionnaire in a new sample of 427 older adults using Confirmatory factor analysis. RESULTS: Analyses indicated 12 items that discriminated well between anxious and non-anxious participants and distributed along the latent continuum of each trait. The GAS-12 fits a three-factor structure. There was also evidence for convergent and divergent validity. CONCLUSIONS: The Italian GAS-12 appears to be a useful instrument for the quantitative screening of anxiety in Italian older adults. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Anxiety imposes significant impairment thus making imperative the screening and assessment of anxiety symptoms. The GAS-12 is particularly indicated with limited time and many scales in a clinical assessment or research protocols.

Motor Imagery as a Key Factor for Healthy Ageing: A Review of New Insights and Techniques.

Motor imagery (MI) describes a dynamic cognitive process where a movement is mentally simulated without taking place and holds potential as a means of stimulating motor learning and regaining motor skills. There is growing evidence that imagined and executed actions have common neural circuitry. Since MI counteracts cognitive and motor decline, a growing interest in MI-based mental exercise for older individuals has emerged. Here we review the last decade's scientific literature on age-related changes in MI skills. Heterogeneity in the experimental protocols, as well as the use of populations with unrepresentative age, is making it challenging to draw unambiguous conclusions about MI skills preservation. Self-report and behavioural tasks have shown that some MI components are preserved, while others are impaired. Evidence from neuroimaging studies revealed that, during MI tasks, older individuals hyperactivate their sensorimotor and attentional networks. Some studies have argued that this represents a compensatory mechanism, others claim that this is a sign of cognitive decline. However, further studies are needed to establish whether MI could be used as a promotion factor to improve cognitive functioning and well-being in older people.

Curiosity Killed the Cat but Not Memory: Enhanced Performance in High-Curiosity States.

Curiosity benefits memory for target information and may also benefit memory for incidental information presented during curiosity states. However, it is not known whether incidental curiosity-enhanced memory depends on or is affected by the valence of the incidental information during curiosity states. Here, older and younger participants incidentally encoded unrelated face images (positive, negative, and neutral) while they anticipated answers to trivia questions. We found memory enhancements for answers to trivia questions and unrelated faces presented during high-curiosity compared with low-curiosity states in both younger and older adults. Interestingly, face valence did not modify memory for unrelated faces. This suggests processes associated with the elicitation of curiosity enhance memory for incidental information instead of valence.

Dopamine-related polymorphisms and Affective Working Memory in aging.

The neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) is a key regulatory component of executive functioning and dysfunction in dopaminergic circuity has been shown to result in impaired working memory. Studies have identified multiple common genetic variants suggested to functionally impact the DA system and behaviorally alter working memory performance. Here, we aimed to develop a predictive model of affective working memory and to examine whether specific combinations of polymorphisms differently influence later encoding processes in affective working memory. Specifically, we examined the effects of the dopamine D2 and D1 receptors and Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT), on affective working memory in 155 older adults. Our model identified genotype variants, and scores on the Mini-Mental State exam and Geriatric depression scales as significant influencers in the predictive model whereas behavioral results showed specific patterns of performance linked to valence and string length but not to specific genetic variants. That is, all participants remembered a more positive words compared to negative and neutral words when remembering short strings of 3 or 4 words whereas performance on long strings, 5 or 6 words, revealed a more general affective enhancement independent of genotype. These findings are some of the first to investigate the effects dopaminergic enzyme and receptor interactions on affective working memory.

Do Older and Younger Adults Prefer the Positive or Avoid the Negative?

Affective information is processed in different ways across one's lifespan. Explanations for this pattern of performance are multiple and range from top-down motivational shifts and cognitive control to faster bottom-up and implicit processes. In this study, we aimed to investigate implicit affective information processing and positivity effects by examining performance in a modified version of the dot-probe task across three image-pair conditions (positive/neutral; negative/neutral; and positive/negative). We examined data from 50 older adults and 50 younger adults. The results showed that affective information processing varies with age and valence and that age effects in affective processing may occur early during information processing. Positivity biases emerge in both younger and older adults. However, while younger adults seem to prioritize positive information independently of context, older adults showed this prioritization only when presented in an emotional (i.e., negative) context. Moreover, older adults showed a tendency to avoid negative information whereas younger adults showed a general bias for affective content modulated by image-pair context.

When twice is better than once: increased liking of repeated items influences memory in younger and older adults.

BACKGROUND: Numerous studies have reported that the repeated presentation of a stimulus leads to an increase in positive affect towards the stimulus itself (the so-called mere exposure effect). Here, we evaluate whether changes in liking due to repetition may have a differential impact on subsequent memories in younger and older adults. METHOD: In two experiments, younger and older adults were asked to rate a series of nonwords (Experiment 1) or unfamiliar neutral faces (Experiment 2) in terms of how much they like them and then presented with a surprise yes-no recognition memory task. At study, items were repeated either consecutively (massed presentation) or with a lag of 6 intervening items (spaced presentation). RESULTS: In both experiments, participants rated spaced repeated items more positively than massed items, i.e. they liked them most. Moreover, older adults remembered spaced stimuli that they liked most better than younger adults. CONCLUSIONS: The findings are discussed in accordance with the mechanisms underlying positivity effects in memory and the effect of repetition on memory encoding.

Memory for item-location bindings is enhanced in older adults with appetitive motivationally laden pictures.

Both the selection and consumption of food are biologically necessary for survival. Consequently, individuals may consider food as a primary and biologically relevant stimulus. In addition, recent findings support specific patterns of food preference during the lifespan development. Indeed, the preference for sweet taste largely observed in newborns and children seems to decline in young adults and then re-emerge again in older adults. This motivational preference for sweet food in older adults may be potentially useful in the cognitive domain since many studies have found that motivationally or emotionally laden information is more likely to be detected, stored in memory and retrieved better than neutral information. To address this issue, we designed an item-location binding task with sweet food, savory food and object pictures, and asked young and older adults to maintain information in working memory and respond based on memory for either individual features or feature combination (i.e., identification, location, or combined identification + location information). Results evidenced a significant enhancement of older adults' performance in the binding of motivationally relevant stimuli and their location, evidencing the potential usefulness of motivationally laden stimuli in promoting more effective binding processes and probably, more general working memory processes.

Crossmodal congruency effects between sound and food pictures in a forced-choice task.

Research using short musical sequences and musical tracks created by means of computer algorithms has demonstrated that individuals with or without musical skills can match these soundtracks to specific tastes with above-chance accuracy. More recently, a study that investigated implicit effects associated with crossmodal congruency/incongruency between auditory cues and food images found that such soundtracks are effective in eliciting facilitating effects of taste quality classification with congruent food images as well. In the present study, we tested whether this crossmodal congruency between auditory cues and food images may also influence food image choice by means of a forced-choice task. We selected and used sweet and salty soundtracks as stimuli and food images including both low- and high-calorie exemplars and asked participants to select which food they would prefer to eat (one sweet and one salty) while listening to the soundtracks. We found a general greater proportion of food choices in the soundtracks matching tastes conditions, and that soundtracks matching tastes are effective in influencing congruent food image choices, supporting previous research and adding new interesting outcomes.

A Bottom-Up Validation of the IAPS, GAPED, and NAPS Affective Picture Databases: Differential Effects on Behavioral Performance.

The concept of emotion is a complex neural and psychological phenomenon, central to the organization of human social behavior. As the result of subjective experience, emotions involve bottom-up cognitive styles responsible for efficient adaptation of human behavior to the environment based on salient goals. Indeed, bottom-up cognitive processes are mandatory for clarifying emotion-cognition interactions. Accordingly, a huge number of studies and standardized affective stimuli databases have been developed (i.e., International Affective Picture System (IAPS), Geneva Affective Picture Database (GAPED), and Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS)). However, these neither accurately reflect the complex neural system underlying emotional responses nor do they offer a comprehensive framework for researchers. The present article aims to provide an additional bottom-up validation of affective stimuli that are independent from cognitive processing and control mechanisms, related to the implicit relevance and evolutionistic significance of stimuli. A subset of 360 images from the original NAPS, GAPED, and IAPS datasets was selected in order to proportionally cover the whole dimensional affective space. Among these, using a two-step analysis strategy, we identified three clusters ("good performance", "poor performance", and "false alarm") of stimuli with similar cognitive response profiles. Results showed that the three clusters differed in terms of arousal and database membership, but not in terms of valence. The new database, with accompanying ratings and image parameters, allows researchers to select visual stimuli independent from dimensional/discrete-categories, and provides information on the implicit effects triggered by such stimuli.

Do patients with hallucinations imagine speech right?

A direct relationship between auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) and decreased left-hemispheric lateralization in speech perception has been often described, although it has not been conclusively proven. The specific lateralization of AVHs has been poorly explored. However, patients with verbal hallucinations show a weak Right Ear Advantage (REA) in verbal perception compared to non AVHs listeners suggesting that left-hemispheric language area are involved in AVHs. In the present study, 29 schizophrenia patients with AVHs, 31 patients with psychotic bipolar disorder who experienced frequent AVHs, 27 patients with schizophrenia who had never experienced AVHs and 57 healthy controls were required to imagine hearing a voice in one ear alone. In line with previous evidence healthy controls confirmed the expected REA for auditory imagery, and the same REA was also found in non-hallucinator patients. However, in line with our hypothesis, patients with schizophrenia and psychotic bipolar disorder with AVHs showed no lateral bias. Results extend the relationship between abnormal asymmetry for verbal stimuli and AVHs to verbal imagery, suggesting that atypical verbal imagery may reflect a disruption of inter-hemispheric connectivity between areas implicated in the generation and monitoring of verbal imagery and may be predictive of a predisposition for AVHs. Results also indicate that the relationship between AVHs and hemispheric lateralization for auditory verbal imagery is not specific to schizophrenia but may extend to other disorders as well.

Anticipatory feelings: Neural correlates and linguistic markers.

This review introduces anticipatory feelings (AF) as a new construct related to the process of anticipation and prediction of future events. AF, defined as the state of awareness of physiological and neurocognitive changes that occur within an oganism in the form of a process of adapting to future events, are an important component of anticipation and expectancy. They encompass bodily-related interoceptive and affective components and are influenced by intrapersonal and dispositional factors, such as optimism, hope, pessimism, or worry. In the present review, we consider evidence from animal and human research, including neuroimaging studies, to characterize the brain structures and brain networks involved in AF. The majority of studies reviewed revealed three brain regions involved in future oriented feelings: 1) the insula; 2) the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC); and 3) the amygdala. Moreover, these brain regions were confirmed by a meta-analysis, using a platform for large-scale, automated synthesis of fMRI data. Finally, by adopting a neurolinguistic and a big data approach, we illustrate how AF are expressed in language.

Neuroimaging the consciousness of self: Review, and conceptual-methodological framework.

We review neuroimaging research investigating self-referential processing (SRP), that is, how we respond to stimuli that reference ourselves, prefaced by a lexical-thematic analysis of words indicative of "self-feelings". We consider SRP as occurring verbally (V-SRP) and non-verbally (NV-SRP), both in the controlled, "top-down" form of introspective and interoceptive tasks, respectively, as well as in the "bottom-up" spontaneous or automatic form of "mind wandering" and "body wandering" that occurs during resting state. Our review leads us to outline a conceptual and methodological framework for future SRP research that we briefly apply toward understanding certain psychological and neurological disorders symptomatically associated with abnormal SRP. Our discussion is partly guided by William James' original writings on the consciousness of self.

The effects of music on spatial reasoning.

Studies on the effects of music on spatial reasoning report conflicting results. Some studies show slight effects, and others show no effects but few seem to replicate the strong findings of the first study published in Rauscher et al. Nature, 365(6447), 611-612, (1993). Nonetheless, the debate about the performance enhancing "Mozart effect" remains to be of great interest. In this study, we manipulated different physical parameters of sound traces (amplitude and frequency) to investigate whether particular dimensions may explain the enhancement effects found in spatial tasks following music listening. To this end, we asked 179 undergraduates and 183 older adults to listen to 5-min sound traces (Mozart KV 448, amplitude modulation tone, frequency modulation tone, white noise) and then complete a spatial reasoning task. In particular, results showed that repetitive frequency changes, as occurring in Mozart's melodies or in a frequency modulation tone, enhance performance.

Competing national memories of World War II.

We assessed the knowledge of 1,338 people from 11 countries (8 former Allied and 3 former Axis) about World War II. When asked what percentage their country contributed to the war effort, across Allied countries, estimates totaled 309%, and Axis nations' estimates came to 140%. People in 4 nations claimed more than 50% responsibility for their country (Germany, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States). The overclaiming of responsibility reflected in these percentages was moderated when subjects were asked to consider the contributions of other countries; however, Russians continued to claim great responsibility, the only country that remained well over 50% in its claim of responsibility for the Allied victory. If deaths in the war are considered a proxy of a nation's contributions, the Soviet Union did carry much of the burden. This study points to sharp differences in national memory even across nations who fought on the same side in the war. Differing national perspectives shape diverse memories of the same complex event.

Emotional Prosody Effects on Verbal Memory in Euthymic Patients With Bipolar Disorder.

A growing body of evidence suggests that emotional prosody influences the ability to remember verbal information. Although bipolar disorder (BD) has been shown to be associated with deficits in verbal memory and emotional processing, the relation between these processes in this population remains unclear. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the impact of emotional prosody on verbal memory in euthymic BD patients compared with controls. Participants were randomly divided into three subgroups according to different prosody listening conditions (a story read with a positive, negative, or neutral prosody) and effects on a yes-no recognition memory task were investigated. Results showed that euthymic bipolar patients remembered comparable numbers of words after listening to the story with a negative or neutral prosody but remembered fewer words after listening to the positive version compared with healthy controls. Results suggest that verbal memory is hindered in BD patients after listening to the story read with a positive prosody. This recognition bias for information with a positive prosody may lead to negative intrusive verbal memories and poor emotion regulation.

Aging and the Combined effects of ADRA2B and CB1 deletions on Affective Working Memory.

Many studies have found that memory for affective material is better than memory for neutral information and memory for positive material compared to negative material is better in older adults. Behavioral, neurophysiological as well as single polymorphism differences have been advanced to account for these effects. Here, we aimed to examine whether the combination of two polymorphisms (ADRA2B and CB1) in older adults influences active maintenance and manipulation of emotional information in aging working memory. We examined genotype data from 207 older adults (56 double deletion carriers, 116 single deletion carriers and 35 no deletion carriers) who performed a verbal operation span-like task with positive, negative and neutral words. We found that subjects carrying both ADRA2B and CB1 variants generally remembered a higher number of words. In addition, double carriers showed positivity effects while single carriers showed more general emotional enhancement effects, especially as strings lengthened. These findings are amongst the first to suggest a haplotype account of positivity effects in older adults' memory.