Music, emotion, and autobiographical memory: they're playing your song.

Very long-term memory for popular music was investigated. Older and younger adults listened to 20-sec excerpts of popular songs drawn from across the 20th century. The subjects gave emotionality and preference ratings and tried to name the title, artist, and year of popularity for each excerpt. They also performed a cued memory test for the lyrics. The older adults' emotionality ratings were highest for songs from their youth; they remembered more about these songs, as well. However, the stimuli failed to cue many autobiographical memories of specific events. Further analyses revealed that the older adults were less likely than the younger adults to retrieve multiple attributes of a song together (i.e., title and artist) and that there was a significant positive correlation between emotion and memory, especially for the older adults. These results have implications for research on long-term memory, as well as on the relationship between emotion and memory.

Memorability as a measure of processing: a unit analysis of prose and list learning.

The percentage of subjects recalling each unit in a list or prose passage is considered as a dependent measure. When the same units are recalled in different tasks, processing is assumed to be the same; when different units are recalled, processing is assumed to be different. Two collections of memory tasks are presented, one for lists and one for prose. The relations found in these two collections are supported by an extensive reanalysis of the existing prose memory literature. The same set of words were learned by 13 different groups of subjects under 13 different conditions. Included were intentional free-recall tasks, incidental free recall following lexical decision, and incidental free recall following ratings of orthographic distinctiveness and emotionality. Although the nine free-recall tasks varied widely with regard to the amount of recall, the relative probability of recall for the words was very similar among the tasks. Imagery encoding and recognition produced relative probabilities of recall that were different from each other and from the free-recall tasks. Similar results were obtained with a prose passage. A story was learned by 13 different groups of subjects under 13 different conditions. Eight free-recall tasks, which varied with respect to incidental or intentional learning, retention interval, and the age of the subjects, produced similar relative probabilities of recall, whereas recognition and prompted recall produced relative probabilities of recall that were different from each other and from the free-recall tasks. A review of the prose literature was undertaken to test the generality of these results. Analysis of variance is the most common statistical procedure in this literature. If the relative probability of recall of units varied across conditions, a units by condition interaction would be expected. For the 12 studies that manipulated retention interval, an average of 21% of the variance was accounted for by the main effect of retention interval, 17% by the main effect of units, and only 2% by the retention interval by units interaction. Similarly, for the 12 studies that varied the age of the subjects, 6% of the variance was accounted for by the main effect of age, 32% by the main effect of units, and only 1% by the interaction of age by units.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

The Rational Adolescent: Strategic Information Processing during Decision Making Revealed by Eye Tracking.

Adolescence is often viewed as a time of irrational, risky decision-making - despite adolescents' competence in other cognitive domains. In this study, we examined the strategies used by adolescents (N=30) and young adults (N=47) to resolve complex, multi-outcome economic gambles. Compared to adults, adolescents were more likely to make conservative, loss-minimizing choices consistent with economic models. Eye-tracking data showed that prior to decisions, adolescents acquired more information in a more thorough manner; that is, they engaged in a more analytic processing strategy indicative of trade-offs between decision variables. In contrast, young adults' decisions were more consistent with heuristics that simplified the decision problem, at the expense of analytic precision. Collectively, these results demonstrate a counter-intuitive developmental transition in economic decision making: adolescents' decisions are more consistent with rational-choice models, while young adults more readily engage task-appropriate heuristics.

Improvement in visual search with practice: mapping learning-related changes in neurocognitive stages of processing.

Practice can improve performance on visual search tasks; the neural mechanisms underlying such improvements, however, are not clear. Response time typically shortens with practice, but which components of the stimulus-response processing chain facilitate this behavioral change? Improved search performance could result from enhancements in various cognitive processing stages, including (1) sensory processing, (2) attentional allocation, (3) target discrimination, (4) motor-response preparation, and/or (5) response execution. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) as human participants completed a five-day visual-search protocol in which they reported the orientation of a color popout target within an array of ellipses. We assessed changes in behavioral performance and in ERP components associated with various stages of processing. After practice, response time decreased in all participants (while accuracy remained consistent), and electrophysiological measures revealed modulation of several ERP components. First, amplitudes of the early sensory-evoked N1 component at 150 ms increased bilaterally, indicating enhanced visual sensory processing of the array. Second, the negative-polarity posterior-contralateral component (N2pc, 170-250 ms) was earlier and larger, demonstrating enhanced attentional orienting. Third, the amplitude of the sustained posterior contralateral negativity component (SPCN, 300-400 ms) decreased, indicating facilitated target discrimination. Finally, faster motor-response preparation and execution were observed after practice, as indicated by latency changes in both the stimulus-locked and response-locked lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs). These electrophysiological results delineate the functional plasticity in key mechanisms underlying visual search with high temporal resolution and illustrate how practice influences various cognitive and neural processing stages leading to enhanced behavioral performance.