What do students remember? Episodic memory and the development of schematization

Research examining changes in memory and memory awareness during learning suggests that early in the process, students primarily have representations that are episodic in nature and experience, 'remember' awareness during recall. However, as learning continues and schematization occurs, students' knowledge is more likely to be dominated by semantic memory representations and 'just know' awareness is experienced during recall. The greater the amount of remembering experienced early in learning, the more likely it is that the shift to knowing will occur in students. In this study, university students studied either material rich in distinctive features that may serve as cues to episodic memory, or material lacking in these features. Students' knowledge was tested after a 2-day and a 5-wk interval. In contrast to students who studied the material lacking distinctive features, students who studied the distinctively rich material showed a predominance of remember awareness on the first test, and on the follow-up test showed a predominance of know awareness and were able to recall more details of the learning material. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.

Play it again: did this melody occur more frequently or was it heard more recently? The role of stimulus familiarity in episodic recognition of music

Episodic recognition of novel and familiar melodies was examined by asking participants to make judgments about the recency and frequency of presentation of melodies over the course of two days of testing. For novel melodies, recency judgments were poor and participants often confused the number of presentations of a melody with its day of presentation; melodies heard frequently were judged as have been heard more recently than they actually were. For familiar melodies, recency judgments were much more accurate and the number of presentations of a melody helped rather than hindered performance. Frequency judgments were generally more accurate than recency judgments and did not demonstrate the same interaction with musical familiarity. Overall, these findings suggest that (1) episodic recognition of novel melodies is based more on a generalized feeling of familiarity than on a specific episodic memory, (2) frequency information contributes more strongly to this generalized memory than recency information, and (3) the formation of an episodic memory for a melody depends either on the overall familiarity of the stimulus or the availability of a verbal label. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The effects of different review opportunities on schematisation of knowledge

Recent research suggests that early in learning, students primarily use episodic memory when recalling information, but as learning develops and schematisation occurs, students' knowledge is likely to be dominated by semantic memory. This shift has been examined through student's memory awareness; 'remembering' is linked to episodic memory and 'knowing' is linked to semantic memory. This paper explores the effect of different review opportunities on students' memory awareness and schematisation, and reports on findings that indicate students are more likely to shift from 'remembering' to 'knowing' if they have the opportunity to review the learning material, but regularly and in different formats. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Recalling yesterday and predicting tomorrow

Three-, 4- and 5-year-old children were asked to report something that they did do yesterday and something that they were going to do tomorrow. They were also asked to recall events that had not occurred yesterday, and predict events that would not occur tomorrow. In two studies these simple questions revealed striking age differences in the ability to report personal events from the past and the future. Only a minority of 3-year-olds but a majority of the older children were able to appropriately answer these questions. These findings substantiate the proposal that the ability to recall past events and the ability to predict future events (i.e., mental time travel), emerge in tandem between the ages of 3 and 5 years. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Making decisions with the future in mind: Developmental and comparative identification of mental time travel

Mechanisms that produce behavior which increase future survival chances provide an adaptive advantage. The flexibility of human behavior is at least partly the result of one such mechanism, our ability to travel mentally in time and entertain potential future scenarios. We can study mental time travel in children using language. Current results suggest that key developments occur between the ages of three to five. However, linguistic performance can be misleading as language itself is developing. We therefore advocate the use of methodologies that focus on future-oriented action. Mental time travel required profound changes in humans' motivational system, so that current behavior could be directed to secure not just present, but individually anticipated future needs. Such behavior should be distinguishable from behavior based on current drives, or on other mechanisms. We propose an experimental paradigm that provides subjects with an opportunity to act now to satisfy a need not currently experienced. This approach may be used to assess mental time travel in nonhuman animals. We conclude by describing a preliminary study employing an adaptation of this paradigm for children. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Cognitive neuroimaging: Cognitive science out of the armchair

Cognitive scientists were not quick to embrace the functional neuroimaging technologies that emerged during the late 20th century. In this new century, cognitive scientists continue to question, not unreasonably, the relevance of functional neuroimaging investigations that fail to address questions of interest to cognitive science. However, some ultra-cognitive scientists assert that these experiments can never be of relevance to the Study of cognition. Their reasoning reflects an adherence to a functionalist philosophy that arbitrarily and purposefully distinguishes mental information-processing systems from brain or brain-like operations. This article addresses whether data from properly conducted functional neuroimaging studies can inform and Subsequently constrain the assumptions of theoretical cognitive models. The article commences with a focus upon the functionalist philosophy espoused by the ultra-cognitive scientists, contrasting it with the materialist philosophy that motivates both cognitive neuromiaging investigations and connectionist modelling of cognitive systems. Connectionism and cognitive neuroimaging share many features, including an emphasis on unified cognitive and neural models of systems that combine localist and distributed representations. The utility of designing cognitive neuroimaging studies to test (primarily) connectionist models of cognitive phenomena is illustrated using data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigations of language production and episodic memory. (C) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.