The acquisition of an artificial logographic script and bilingual working memory : Evidence for L1-specific orthographic processing skills transfer in Chinese-English bilinguals

Studies of orthographic skills transfer between languages focus mostly on working memory (WM) ability in alphabetic first language (L1) speakers when learning another, often alphabetically congruent, language. We report two studies that, instead, explored the transferability of L1 orthographic processing skills in WM in logographic-L1 and alphabetic-L1 speakers. English-French bilingual and English monolingual (alphabetic-L1) speakers, and Chinese-English (logographic-L1) speakers, learned a set of artificial logographs and associated meanings (Study 1). The logographs were used in WM tasks with and without concurrent articulatory or visuo-spatial suppression. The logographic-L1 bilinguals were markedly less affected by articulatory suppression than alphabetic-L1 monolinguals (who did not differ from their bilingual peers). Bilinguals overall were less affected by spatial interference, reflecting superior phonological processing skills or, conceivably, greater executive control. A comparison of span sizes for meaningful and meaningless logographs (Study 2) replicated these findings. However, the logographic-L1 bilinguals’ spans in L1 were measurably greater than those of their alphabetic-L1 (bilingual and monolingual) peers; a finding unaccounted for by faster articulation rates or differences in general intelligence. The overall pattern of results suggests an advantage (possibly perceptual) for logographic-L1 speakers, over and above the bilingual advantage also seen elsewhere in third language (L3) acquisition.

Australian television, popular memory and suburbia

Different archives of television material construct different versions of Australian national identity. There exists a Pro-Am archive of Australian television history materials consisting of many individual collections. This archive is not centrally located nor clearly bounded. The collections are not all linked to each other, nor are they aware of each other, and they do not claim to have a single common project. Pro-Am collections tend not to address Australian television as a whole, rather addressing particular genres, programs or production companies. Their vision of Australia is 'ordinary' and everyday. The boundaries of 'Australia' in the Pro-Am archive are porous, allowing non-Australians to contribute material, and also including non-Australian material and this causes little sense of anxiety.

A distributed memory for networked livecoding performance

The symbolic and improvisational nature of Livecoding requires a shared networking framework to be flexible and extensible, while at the same time providing support for synchronisation, persistence and redundancy. Above all the framework should be robust and available across a range of platforms. This paper proposes tuple space as a suitable framework for network communication in ensemble livecoding contexts. The role of tuple space as a concurrency framework and the associated timing aspects of the tuple space model are explored through Spaces, an implementation of tuple space for the Impromptu environment.

Digital archives and cultural memory : discovering lost histories in digitised Australian children's literature 1851-1945

A recent Australian literature digitisation project uncovered some surprising discoveries in the children’s books that it digitised. The Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) Project digitised children’s books that were first published between 1851 to 1945 and made them available online through AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. The digitisation process also preserved, within the pages of those books, a range of bookplates, book labels, inscriptions, and loose ephemera. This material allows us to trace the provenance of some of the digitised works, some of which came from the personal libraries of now-famous authors, and others from less celebrated sources. These extra-textual traces can contribute to cultural memory of the past by providing evidence of how books were collected and exchanged, and what kinds of books were presented as prizes in schools and Sunday schools. They also provide insight into Australian literary and artistic networks, particularly of the first few decades of the 20th century. This article describes the kinds of material uncovered in the digitisation process and suggests that the material provides insights into literary and cultural histories that might otherwise be forgotten. It also argues that the indexing of this material is vital if it is not to be lost to future researchers.

Preserving the past in digital memory

The process of researching children’s literature from the past is a growing challenge as resources age and are increasingly treated as rare items, stored away within libraries and other research centres. In Australia, researchers and librarians have collaborated with the bibliographic database AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource to produce the Australian Children’s Literature Digital Resources Project (CLDR). This Project aims to address the growing demand for online access to rare children’s literature resources, and demonstrates the research potential of early Australian children’s literature by supplementing the collection with relevant critical articles. The CLDR project is designed with a specific focus and provides access to full text Australian children’s literature from European settlement to 1945. The collection demonstrates a need and desire to preserve literature treasures to prevent losing such collections in a digital age. The collection covers many themes relevant to the conference including, trauma, survival, memory, survival, hauntings, and histories. The resource provides new and exciting ways with which to research children’s literature from the past and offers a fascinating repository to scholars and professionals of ranging disciplines who are in interested in Australian children’s literature.

Use of a clay modeling task to reduce chocolate craving

Elaborated Intrusion theory (EI theory; Kavanagh, Andrade, & May, 2005) posits two main cognitive components in craving: associative processes that lead to intrusive thoughts about the craved substance or activity, and elaborative processes supporting mental imagery of the substance or activity. We used a novel visuospatial task to test the hypothesis that visual imagery plays a key role in craving. Experiment 1 showed that spending 10 min constructing shapes from modeling clay (plasticine) reduced participants' craving for chocolate compared with spending 10 min 'letting your mind wander'. Increasing the load on verbal working memory using a mental arithmetic task (counting backwards by threes) did not reduce craving further. Experiment 2 compared effects on craving of a simpler verbal task (counting by ones) and clay modeling. Clay modeling reduced overall craving strength and strength of craving imagery, and reduced the frequency of thoughts about chocolate. The results are consistent with EI theory, showing that craving is reduced by loading the visuospatial sketchpad of working memory but not by loading the phonological loop. Clay modeling might be a useful self-help tool to help manage craving for chocolate, snacks and other foods.

Does Identifying Ambushers as Non-Sponsors Help or Hurt Legitimate Sponsors? Memory and Attitudinal Consequences

Two experiments examine outcomes for sponsor and ambusher brands within sponsorship settings. It is demonstrated that although making consumers aware of the presence of ambusher brands can reduce subsequent event recall to competitor cues, recall to sponsor cues can also suffer. Attitudinal effects are also considered.

Managing memory and reducing I/O cost for correlation matrix calculation in bioinformatics

The generation of a correlation matrix from a large set of long gene sequences is a common requirement in many bioinformatics problems such as phylogenetic analysis. The generation is not only computationally intensive but also requires significant memory resources as, typically, few gene sequences can be simultaneously stored in primary memory. The standard practice in such computation is to use frequent input/output (I/O) operations. Therefore, minimizing the number of these operations will yield much faster run-times. This paper develops an approach for the faster and scalable computing of large-size correlation matrices through the full use of available memory and a reduced number of I/O operations. The approach is scalable in the sense that the same algorithms can be executed on different computing platforms with different amounts of memory and can be applied to different problems with different correlation matrix sizes. The significant performance improvement of the approach over the existing approaches is demonstrated through benchmark examples.

Can testosterone replacement decrease the memory problem of old age?

The world is rapidly ageing. It is against this backdrop that there are increasing incidences of dementia reported worldwide, with Alzheimer's disease (AD) being the most common form of dementia in the elderly. It is estimated that AD affects almost 4 million people in the US, and costs the US economy more than 65 million dollars annually. There is currently no cure for AD but various therapeutic agents have been employed in attempting to slow down the progression of the illness, one of which is oestrogen. Over the last decades, scientists have focused mainly on the roles of oestrogen in the prevention and treatment of AD. Newer evidences suggested that testosterone might also be involved in the pathogenesis of AD. Although the exact mechanisms on how androgen might affect AD are still largely unknown, it is known that testosterone can act directly via androgen receptor-dependent mechanisms or indirectly by converting to oestrogen to exert this effect. Clinical trials need to be conducted to ascertain the putative role of androgen replacement in Alzheimer's disease.

Memory effect in the deposition of C20 fullerenes on a diamond surface

In this paper, the deposition of C-20 fullerenes on a diamond (001)-(2x1) surface and the fabrication of C-20 thin film at 100 K were investigated by a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation using the many-body Brenner bond order potential. First, we found that the collision dynamic of a single C-20 fullerene on a diamond surface was strongly dependent on its impact energy. Within the energy range 10-45 eV, the C-20 fullerene chemisorbed on the surface retained its free cage structure. This is consistent with the experimental observation, where it was called the memory effect in "C-20-type" films [P. Melion , Int. J. Mod. B 9, 339 (1995); P. Milani , Cluster Beam Synthesis of Nanostructured Materials (Springer, Berlin, 1999)]. Next, more than one hundred C-20 (10-25 eV) were deposited one after the other onto the surface. The initial growth stage of C-20 thin film was observed to be in the three-dimensional island mode. The randomly deposited C-20 fullerenes stacked on diamond surface and acted as building blocks forming a polymerlike structure. The assembled film was also highly porous due to cluster-cluster interaction. The bond angle distribution and the neighbor-atom-number distribution of the film presented a well-defined local order, which is of sp(3) hybridization character, the same as that of a free C-20 cage. These simulation results are again in good agreement with the experimental observation. Finally, the deposited C-20 film showed high stability even when the temperature was raised up to 1500 K.

Memory : (Re)imagining the past through children's literature

There has been a renewal of interest in memory studies in recent years, particularly in the Western world. This chapter considers aspects of personal memory followed by the concept of cultural memory. It then examines how the Australian cultural memory of the Anzac Legend is represented in a number of recent picture books.

Role of the apolipoprotein E and catechol-O-methyltransferase genes in prospective and retrospective memory traits

Human memory is a complex neurocognitive process. By combining psychological and molecular genetics expertise, we examined the APOE ε4 allele, a known risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, and the COMT Val 158 polymorphism, previously implicated in schizophrenia, for association with lowered memory functioning in healthy adults. To assess memory type we used a range of memory tests of both retrospective and prospective memory. Genotypes were determined using RFLP analysis and compared with mean memory scores using univariate ANOVAs. Despite a modest sample size (n=197), our study found a significant effect of the APOE ε4 polymorphism in prospective memory. Supporting our hypothesis, a significant difference was demonstrated between genotype groups for means of the Comprehensive Assessment of Prospective Memory total score (p=0.036; ε4 alleles=1.99; all other alleles=1.86). In addition, we demonstrate a significant interactive effect between the APOE ε4 and COMT polymorphisms in semantic memory. This is the first study to investigate both APOE and COMT genotypes in relation to memory in non-pathological adults and provides important information regarding the effect of genetic determinants on human memory.