Differential effects of age of acquisition and frequency on memory: evidence from free recall of pictures and words in Turkish

The advantage of processing early acquired items over late acquired items in lexical and semantic tasks across a number of languages is well documented. Interestingly contradictory evidence has been reported in recall tasks where participants perform better overall on late acquired items compared to early acquired items in English (Dewhurst, Hitch & Barry, 1998). Moreover, free recall has also been reported to be modulated by frequency as well as list type in that studying pure lists of high frequency words or low frequency words typically leads to a recall advantage for high frequency words (Dewhurst, Brandt & Sharp, 2004). This recall advantage either disappears or is reversed when the same items are presented in mixed lists containing both high and low frequency items (Dewhurst et al, 2004). The current experiment aims to shed further light on this discrepancy by exploring the influence of AoA and frequency on free recall on standardised pictures and their names (words) in Turkish in mixed and pure lists (Raman, Raman & Mertan, 2014). Eighty participants were recruited from Yeditepe University and were assigned to either a picture (N=40) or a word condition (N=40) in which stimuli were presented in either a mixed or a pure list. Following a distracter task, participants were asked to recall as many pictures or words as they could remember from the list they viewed. The findings lend partial support to the previous findings in English and the implications are discussed within the context of current cognitive frameworks

Gas spreading on a heated wall wetted by liquid

This study deals with a simple pure fluid whose temperature is slightly below its critical temperature and whose density is nearly critical, so that the gas and liquid phases coexist. Under equilibrium conditions, such a liquid completely wets the container wall and the gas phase is always separated from the solid by a wetting film. We report a striking change in the shape of the gas-liquid interface influenced by heating under weightlessness where the gas phase spreads over a hot solid surface showing an apparent contact angle larger than 90°. We show that the two-phase fluid is very sensitive to the differential vapor recoil force and give an explanation that uses this nonequilibrium effect. We also show how these experiments help to understand the boiling crisis, an important technological problem in high-power boiling heat exchange

Towards a conceptual profile: rethinking conceptual mediation in the light of recent cognitive and neuroscientific findings

Abstract not availableChris Dawso