Long-term memory for spatial frequency:A non-replication

Reports on stability of spatial frequency in short-term memory span have confirmed low-level perceptual memory mechanism in early visual processing. However, some studies have also claimed evidence for high-fidelity perceptual long-term storage of spatial frequency. We report an attempted replication of Magnussen et al. (Psychol Sci 14:74–76, 2003) where participants were asked to discriminate the spatial frequency of a reference grating from a test stimulus after intervals of 5 s or 24 h. Group thresholds after 24 h were significantly higher than after 5 s, therefore failing to support long-term storage of spatial frequency

Screening for anxiety, depression and suicidality by epilepsy specialists in adult services in Scotland

OBJECTIVE: Clinical guidelines recommend screening people with epilepsy (PWE) regularly for mental distress, but it is unclear how guidelines are implemented. We surveyed epilepsy specialists in adult Scottish services to determine approaches used to screen for anxiety, depression, and suicidality; the perceived difficulty of screening; factors associated with intention to screen; and treatment decisions made following positive screens.METHODS: An anonymous email-based questionnaire survey of epilepsy nurses and epilepsy neurology specialists (n = 38) was conducted.RESULTS: Two in every three specialists used a systematic screening approach; a third did not. Clinical interview was employed more often than standardized questionnaire. Clinicians reported positive attitudes towards screening but found screening difficult to implement. Intention to screen was associated with favorable attitude, perceived control, and social norm. Pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions were proposed equally often for those screening positive for anxiety or depression.CONCLUSION: Routine screening for mental distress is carried out in Scottish epilepsy treatment settings but is not universal. Attention should be paid to clinician factors associated with screening, such as intention to screen and resulting treatment decisions. These factors are potentially modifiable, offering a means of closing the gap between guideline recommendations and clinical practice.</p

Food-induced Emotional Resonance Improves Emotion Recognition

The effect of food substances on emotional states has been widely investigated, showing, for example, that eating chocolate is able to reduce negative mood. Here, for the first time, we have shown that the consumption of specific food substances is not only able to induce particular emotional states, but more importantly, to facilitate recognition of corresponding emotional facial expressions in others. Participants were asked to perform an emotion recognition task before and after eating either a piece of chocolate or a small amount of fish sauce – which we expected to induce happiness or disgust, respectively. Our results showed that being in a specific emotional state improves recognition of the corresponding emotional facial expression. Indeed, eating chocolate improved recognition of happy faces, while disgusted expressions were more readily recognized after eating fish sauce. In line with the embodied account of emotion understanding, we suggest that people are better at inferring the emotional state of others when their own emotional state resonates with the observed one

Understanding long-term forgetting in the healthy and clinical population: evidence from different research paradigms and methods

Memory and forgetting are closely related, yet cognitive research has neglected the topic of long-term forgetting, leaving several questions unanswered. From a theoretical point of view, understanding the dynamics of normal forgetting would clarify whether forgetting depends on how much information is initially encoded, on the passage of time or on the type of material tested. From a clinical point of view, knowing how people normally forget information would inform our understanding on pathological forgetting in people with neurological conditions, and would aid the development of reliable clinical assessments. This PhD thesis sought to expand our current knowledge on long-term forgetting through various stimulus material and research paradigms, which were: 1. Behavioural paradigms of Prose recall memory to assess how qualitatively distinct episodic details (gist and peripheral) are forgotten and how repeated retrieval and initial degree of post-encoding performance affect their retention (Experiment 1, 2 and 3; Chapter 2). Previous research (Sekeres et al., 2016) demonstrated that forgetting of peripheral details occurs at a faster rate, as compared to memory for gist up to a week. In my experiments, I assessed forgetting of episodic details up to a month by adapting the research design from Slamecka and McElree (1983), who observed parallel forgetting with verbal material up to 5-days. I found that peripheral details were forgotten at a faster rate than gist events when memory was tested after a month, whilst forgetting was countered by repeated testing. With shorter intervals (Experiment 5 and Experiment 6; Chapter 4) I could not observe this differential effect, independently of age that did not modulate the observed effects (Experiment 4; Chapter 3) 2. Neuropsychological research methods to assess whether people in early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease present with Accelerated Long-term Forgetting or not. Some researchers argued that faster forgetting occurs in early Alzheimer’s Disease (Weston et al., 2018), while others did not (Stamate et al., 2020). Experiment 7 (Chapter 5) employed the same prose recall paradigm of previous experiments on a group of people with amnesia (Mild Cognitive Impairment due to Alzheimer’s Disease) and a group of age-matched healthy controls. In this experiment, people with amnesia presented with impaired encoding and faster forgetting of gist events of a story, while memory for peripheral information pervasively remained at floor. I reconciled previous discordant literature by concluding that people with Alzheimer’s Disease show Fast Forgetting when the material to be recalled grossly benefits from repeated testing. 3. Psychophysical methods to investigate perceptual memory and forgetting of sinusoidal gratings up to 24-hr. Experiment 8 (Chapter 6) attempted to replicate a study from Magnussen et al. (2003), who claimed the existence of a high-fidelity perceptual long-term storage of spatial frequency. I failed to replicate these findings, so the existence of a long-term perceptual memory for spatial frequency could not be demonstrated and it would not represent a promising ground for further investigations in healthy aging and people with amnesia. 4. Working memory research methods to study long-term learning and forgetting of feature bindings (colours-shapes combinations). The aim of Experiment 9 (Chapter 7) was to assess whether learning took place after repeated verbal recall by assessing memory retention for a visual array at time intervals of 1-day or 1-week or 1-month, and by also considering the role of awareness of repetition on long-term learning and forgetting of feature binding. I demonstrated that long-term learning and retention of feature bindings is enhanced by repeated recall of the visual array, and this is faster in participants who became aware of repetition. Learning of feature binding remained stable up to a day, and I also found evidence of residual learning after a month, even among those participants who did not learn after repeated array presentations. I therefore concluded that long-term learning and retention of feature binding is supported by two different cognitive mechanisms: visual short-term memory and episodic long-term memory