Short article: When are moving images remembered better? Study–test congruence and the dynamic superiority effect

It has previously been shown that moving images are remembered better than static ones. In two experiments, we investigated the basis for this dynamic superiority effect. Participants studied scenes presented as a single static image, a sequence of still images, or a moving video clip, and 3 days later completed a recognition test in which familiar and novel scenes were presented in all three formats. We found a marked congruency effect: For a given study format, accuracy was highest when test items were shown in the same format. Neither the dynamic superiority effect nor the study–test congruency effect was affected by encoding (Experiment 1) or retrieval (Experiment 2) manipulations, suggesting that these effects are relatively impervious to strategic control. The results demonstrate that the spatio-temporal properties of complex, realistic scenes are preserved in long-term memory. </jats:p

Valorization of Euterpe oleracea Mart. (açaí) by-product: characterization, extraction and formulation.

Açaí es el nombre popular de Euterpe oleracea Mart. La fruta es originaria de la selva amazónica, y el interés de la industria se centra en su pulpa. Esta pulpa obtenida de açaí se comercializa como pulpa congelada, pura o mezclada con otros extractos de frutas. El açaí rara vez se consume como fruta fresca, lo que requiere un proceso industrial donde la pulpa se extrae, se filtra y se congela antes de su comercialización. La pulpa es alrededor del 16% de la fruta entera, por lo que su procesado genera una gran cantidad de residuos que se compone de semillas, fibras y piel, lo que implica un gran problema ambiental. La pulpa muchas veces se convierte en parte del residuo pues es susceptible a muchas enfermedades, tales como la enfermedad de chagas. La pulpa se ha utilizado como tratamiento y prevención de algunas enfermedades, como la demencia, el Alzheimer, el Parkinson, la aterosclerosis, la obesidad y la gastritis, porque el extracto de açaí contiene agentes antioxidantes y antiinflamatorios. Los beneficios del extracto de E. Oleracea están asociados con la presencia de polifenoles, metabolitos secundarios de las plantas, especialmente relacionados con los flavonoides (un tipo de polifenoles), que incluyen voluteína, luteolina, apigenina y orientina, presentes en el extracto. Esta tesis tiene por objetivo estudiar la valorización de los productos no comestibles de Euterpe Oleracea Mart producidos como subproductos del procesamiento industrial de esta fruta. Este estudio se concretó en los siguientes objetivos específicos: (I) caracterizar los subproductos obtenidos en el procesado de E. Oleracea, (pulpa - no útil para el consumo, semillas y torta-del-filtrado) como biomasa y fuente de gran potencial de fitoquímicos; (II) Estudiar la extracción de compuestos bioactivos por el método tradicional Soxhlet, la maceración, la intensificación del proceso aplicando calentamiento por microondas, y el calentamiento por microondas combinado con presurización; (III) formular el material obtenido en la extracción de cada fracción del subproducto de E. Oleracea (torta-del-filtrado, semilla y pulpa) para su aplicación en productos como cremas y colorantes alimentarios naturales.Departamento de Ingeniería Química y Tecnología del Medio AmbienteDoctorado en Ingeniería Química y Ambienta

Encouraging sustainable food consumption through nudges: An experiment with menu labels

Finding ways to steer consumers' food choices towards vegetarian and plant-based meals is important to reduce our diets' environmental impact. This paper investigates how nudges in restaurants can be effectively used to increase sales of vegetarian and plant-based dishes. We partnered with two restaurants, which can host up to 130 guests in total and are in the same building, and we tested the effect of three nudge-based interventions on the sales of vegetarian and plant-based dishes. We found that removing the symbols for vegetarian and plant-based dishes increased the sales of those starters by 10.2 pp., and of those mains by 6.2 pp. When a low emissions symbol was added to the menu to replace the symbols for vegetarian and plant-based dishes, it did not affect sales. However, when the same nudge was made transparent through a statement explaining its purpose on the menu, the sales of those starters increased by 14.1 pp. This result suggests that nudges can be used ethically and still be effective. Overall, these findings support the use of nudges as cost-effective interventions to tackle the issue of unsustainable food consumption in the hospitality sector

The impact of salient labels and choice overload on sustainability judgments: An online experiment investigating consumers’ knowledge and overconfidence

Previous research suggests that contextual factors can affect the perception of food products, however, we still know little about how consumers evaluate these items in terms of sustainability. This research investigates how well shoppers can rate food items in the matter of their environmental impact, whether they are overconfident in their knowledge of food sustainability, and whether labels on packaging and great availability of choice can affect their judgment. Through an online behavioural experiment, we test the impact of salient truthful and untruthful green labels, and of choice overload on people's perceptions of the environmental quality of food products. We find that choice overload is detrimental to consumers’ judgment, but that truthful labels can help shoppers correctly identify sustainable items. However, untruthful labels can negatively impact consumers’ judgments with choice overload, even if shoppers have greater prior knowledge of sustainability. These findings suggest that truthful and untruthful salient labels and choice overload can have an impact on shoppers’ perceptions of food products. We find that overconfidence in one's sustainability judgment is negatively correlated to judgment accuracy. Hence, great care should be taken in presenting food products to consumers to make the most environmentally friendly items stand out

List-length and list-strength effects in recognition memory

The study of interference effects is important to constrain models of memory. List-length manipulations test how adding new information to memory affects memory for the other stored information (list-length effect; LLE). List-strength manipulations test how strengthening some information in memory affects memory for the other non-strengthened information (list-strength effect; LSE). Whereas LLE and LSE are generally found in recall tasks, their empirical status in recognition tasks is less well established. In this thesis, we investigated some boundary conditions for both list-length and list-strength effects. The results provided evidence for the following claims: i) LLE and LSE are real effects in recognition (the effects were obtained after controlling for several confounds); ii) LLE and LSE are modulated by the relative contribution of recall-like processes operating at test (more recollection at test yielded larger effects); iii) LLE and LSE can be modulated by the number of study-test blocks in an experimental session (fewer study-test blocks resulted in larger effects); iv) LLE and LSE can be modulated by the time interval between study and test (shorter intervals produced larger effects) and iv) LLE and LSE may not be strongly modulated by the magnitude of length and strength manipulations (stronger manipulations did not result in larger effects). Taken together, the results support memory models that attribute forgetting in recognition to competition between memory traces during either encoding or retrieval. The results provide little support for models that attribute forgetting solely to interference between the contexts in which a memory was originally stored