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Chess experts have repeatedly demonstrated exceptional recall of chessboards, which is weakened by disruption of the chessboard. However, chess experts still perform better than novices when recalling such disrupted chessboards, suggesting a somewhat generalized expertise effect. In the current study, we examined the extent of this generalized expertise effect on early processing of visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM), by comparing 14 chess experts (Elo rating > 2000) and 15 novices on a change-detection paradigm using disrupted chessboards, where attention had to be selectively deployed to either visual or spatial features, or divided across both features. The paradigm differed in the stimuli used (domain-specific chess pieces vs. novel visual shapes) to evaluate domain-general effects of chess expertise. Both experts and novices had greater memory discriminability for chess stimuli than for the unfamiliar stimuli, suggesting a salience advantage for familiar stimuli. Experts, however, demonstrated better memory discriminability than novices not only for chess stimuli presented on these disrupted chessboards, but also for novel, domain-general stimuli, particularly when detecting spatial changes. This expertise advantage was greater for chessboards with supra-capacity set sizes. For set sizes within the working-memory capacity, the expertise advantage was driven by enhanced selective attention to spatial features by chess experts when compared to visual features. However, any expertise-related VSWM advantage disappeared in the absence of the 8 × 8 chessboard display, which implicates the chessboard display as an essential perceptual aspect facilitating the “expert memory effect” in chess, albeit one that might generalize beyond strictly domain-relevant stimuli.

Voluminous research supports holistic processing of faces. However, little is known about how holistic processing affects recognition of newly learned faces, a question of importance for improving performance in police lineups and other real-world tasks. Drawing on cognitive and neuropsychological research, we suggest that holistic processing facilitates the formation of unitized representations that support discrimination between old and new faces-including new faces that contain old parts-through a unidimensional familiarity signal. In the absence of holistic processing, face recognition is based on relational representations that are relatively difficult to encode, but which allow flexible recognition decisions based on match-mismatch detection to be made. Unlike unitized representations, relational representations can support judgments that newly encountered faces match previously experienced faces in some respects (e.g., some of their features) and yet not in others (e.g., other features, global configuration). Four experiments clarified the relationship of holistic processing to the formation of unitized and relational representations of faces. By manipulating the extent of holistic processing while controlling for the overall level of recognition performance, we demonstrate qualitative effects of holistic processing on how recognition decisions are made with faces. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

PurposeTo examine whether semantic access by speech requires attention in children.MethodChildren (N= 200) named pictures and ignored distractors on a cross-modal (distractors: auditory–no face) or multimodal (distractors: auditory–static face and audiovisual–dynamic face) picture word task. The cross-modal task had a low load, and the multimodal task had a high load (i.e., respectively naming pictures displayed on a blank screen vs. below the talker's face on his T-shirt). Semantic content of distractors was manipulated to be related vs. unrelated to the picture (e.g., picture “dog” with distractors “bear” vs. “cheese”). If irrelevant semantic content manipulation influences naming times on both tasks despite variations in loads, Lavie's (2005) perceptual load model proposes that semantic access is independent of capacity-limited attentional resources; if, however, irrelevant content influences naming only on the cross-modal task (low load), the perceptual load model proposes that semantic access is dependent on attentional resources exhausted by the higher load task.ResultsIrrelevant semantic content affected performance for both tasks in 6- to 9-year-olds but only on the cross-modal task in 4- to 5-year-olds. The addition of visual speech did not influence results on the multimodal task.ConclusionYounger and older children differ in dependence on attentional resources for semantic access by speech.

Older adults show elevated false alarm rates on recognition memory tests involving faces in comparison to younger adults. It has been proposed that this age-related increase in false facial recognition reflects a deficit in recollection and a corresponding increase in the use of familiarity when making memory decisions. To test this hypothesis, we examined the performance of 40 older adults and 40 younger adults on a face recognition memory paradigm involving three different types of lures with varying levels of familiarity. A robust age effect was found, with older adults demonstrating a markedly heightened false alarm rate in comparison to younger adults for "familiarized lures" that were exact repetitions of faces encountered earlier in the experiment, but outside the study list, and therefore required accurate recollection of contextual information to reject. By contrast, there were no age differences in false alarms to "conjunction lures" that recombined parts of study list faces, or to entirely new faces. Overall, the pattern of false recognition errors observed in older adults was consistent with excessive reliance on a familiarity-based response strategy. Specifically, in the absence of recollection older adults appeared to base their memory decisions on item familiarity, as evidenced by a linear increase in false alarm rates with increasing familiarity of the lures. These findings support the notion that automatic memory processes such as familiarity remain invariant with age, while more controlled memory processes such as recollection show age-related decline.

The human visual system responds to expertise, and it has been suggested that regions that process faces also process other objects of expertise including chess boards by experts. We tested whether chess and face processing overlap in brain activity using fMRI. Chess experts and novices exhibited face selective areas, but these regions showed no selectivity to chess configurations relative to other stimuli. We next compared neural responses to chess and to scrambled chess displays to isolate areas relevant to expertise. Areas within the posterior cingulate, orbitofrontal cortex, and right temporal cortex were active in this comparison in experts over novices. We also compared chess and face responses within the posterior cingulate and found this area responsive to chess only in experts. These findings indicate that the configurations in chess are not strongly processed by face-selective regions that are selective for faces in individuals who have expertise in both domains. Further, the area most consistently involved in chess did not show overlap with faces. Overall, these results suggest that expert visual processing may be similar at the level of recognition, but need not show the same neural correlates.

Principal-component analyses of 4 face-recognition studies uncovered 2 independent components. The first component was strongly related to false-alarm errors with new faces as well as to facial "conjunctions" that recombine features of previously studied faces. The second component was strongly related to hits as well as to the conjunction/new difference in false-alarm errors. The pattern of loadings on both components was impressively invariant across the experiments, which differed in age range of participants, stimulus set, list length, facial orientation, and the presence versus absence of familiarized lures along with conjunction and entirely new lures in the recognition test. Taken together, the findings show that neither component was exclusively related to discrimination, criterion, configural processing, featural processing, context recollection, or familiarity. Rather, the data are consistent with a neuropsychological model that distinguishes frontal and occipitotemporal contributions to face recognition memory. Within the framework of the model, findings showed that frontal and occipitotemporal contributions are discernible from the pattern of individual differences in behavioral performance among healthy young adults.

Conjunction errors occur when participants incorrectly identify as "old" novel test stimuli created by recombining parts of two study stimuli (parent items). Prior studies have reported that the conjunction error rate is higher when parent items are studied together than when they are studied apart (a parent proximity effect). In several experiments we attempted to obtain parent proximity effects with naturalistic faces or pairs of symbol strings. We also varied the type of facial conjunction (Experiments 1, 3A-3C), the presentation rate during study (Experiment 5), and the study list length across experiments (long lists in Experiments 1, 3A, 3B.. and 3C; short lists in Experiments 2, 4, and 5). Conjunction effects, but not parent proximity effects, occurred in each experiment. The results are consistent with familiarity-based explanations of the conjunction effect but fail to support a feature bundling hypothesis. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

People of all ages enjoy listening to music, yet most research inmusical development has concentrated on infancy through childhood. Our recent research program examined various aspects of music cognition in younger (ages 18 through 30) and older adults (ages 60 through 80) with varying amounts of musical experience. The studies investigated the independent and combined influences of age and experience on a wide assortment of long and short-term memory tasks. Results showed that some musical tasks reflect the same age-related declines as seen in nonmusical tasks, and musical training does not reduce these age-related declines. In other tasks, experience differences were larger than age differences; in some cases, age differences were nonexistent. The analysis considers how aging and experience may affect different aspects of cognition, and the paper concludes by pointing out the many musical activities that even nonmusical seniors are well equipped to succeed at and enjoy. Why study age differences in memory for music? If shear neglect of a topic can justify it being studied, then surely our question is answered. The voluminous literature on age differences in memory includes only a handful of studies that use musical materials. Recent reviews of this Ii terature by Anderson and Craik (2000), Balota, Dolan, and Duchek (2000), and Backman, Small, and Wahlin (2001 ) do not mention music, and another review by Zacks, Hasher, & Li (2000) mentions only one relevant study. Similarly, only rarely do music cognition journals carry articles concerning age differences. It is clear that we know little about music cognition in old age. But neglect of the problem is only one reason why it needs to be addressed. Several additional reasons come readily to mind. First, everyday observation suggests that older adults enjoy and participate in musical activities. Musical activities have an overall positive effect among people suffering from dementia (Koger, Chapin, & Brotons, 1999) as well among their healthy peers (Darrough & Boswell, 1992). A survey by Gibbons ( 1982) found that 84% of a sample of 152 healthy elderly people wished to improve their musical skills. MUsiC therapists have published suggestions for music programs with the elderly (Bell, 1987; Clair, 1996; Glassman, 1983; Hintz, 2000). However, the dearth of research makes it difficult for therapists to really understand the musical capabilities of their elderly clients. Among the questions that basic research on music and aging can help answer is whether a person can maintain or even improve her or his skill level if given musical training, and to what extent musical programs for older adults should emphasize exposure to familiar vs. new pieces and styles. second, music may be an ideal domain to study the aging of domainspecific processes compared to the aging of general-purpose operations of learning and memory. For example, researchers currently are interested in changes in short-term, or working memory with age. Not only are investigators studying the nature of age differences in working memory itself, they also are examining whether deficits in working memory processes may underlie age differences in long-term memory, prose comprehension, and other cognitive domains. Yet tests of working memory almost always use verbal or visuospatial stimuli, and, for this reason, the dominant model of working memory (Baddeley, 1986) distinguishes only three basic components: a phonological loop, a visuospatial scratchpad, and a central executive. The familiar experience of having a tune "in our head" suggests the operation of a "melodic loop" (Berz, 1995) that might show age differences and have functional importance for a variety of music-related.activities including learning new tunes, recalling old tunes, and, perhaps most important, simply appreciating music. To examine this loop across the adult lifespan is certainly a task that is well worth our time. …

Face processing has several distinctive hallmarks that researchers have attributed either to face-specific mechanisms or to extensive experience distinguishing faces. Here, we examined the face-processing hallmark of selective attention failure--as indexed by the congruency effect in the composite paradigm--in a domain of extreme expertise: chess. Among 27 experts, we found that the congruency effect was equally strong with chessboards and faces. Further, comparing these experts with recreational players and novices, we observed a trade-off: Chess expertise was positively related to the congruency effect with chess yet negatively related to the congruency effect with faces. These and other findings reveal a case of expertise-dependent, facelike processing of objects of expertise and suggest that face and expert-chess recognition share common processes.

If the mouth and eyes of a face are inverted, the altered construction appears grotesque when upright, but not when upside-down. Three studies of this "Thatcher illusion" employed faces that were grotesque when upright because: (a) their eyes and mouths had been inverted ("Thatcherized" faces), (b) their eyes and mouths had been moved (spatially distorted faces), or (c) they had grotesque posed expressions. Inversion reduced the apparent grotesqueness of both Thatcherized and spatially distorted faces, but not grotesque-expression faces. Moreover, Thatcherized and distorted faces, although not grotesque-expression faces, were judged as more similar to normal, smiling faces when face-pairs were inverted than when they were upright. Similarity ratings to inverted face-pairs were correlated with latencies of response to these pairs in a task that encouraged attention to components (e.g., mouths, eyes) rather than wholistic properties. Similarity ratings to upright face-pairs showed no such correlation, and this and other findings suggested that although similarity ratings to upright faces are based on wholistic information, similarity ratings to inverted faces are based largely on components. The Thatcher illusion reflects a disruption of encoding of wholistic information when faces are inverted.

Memory for music presents a paradox. On the one hand, memory for music that people have already learned can be astonishingly good, both in extent and longevity. On the former point, consider how many tunes an average person could recognize, or even recall. No one has even attempted to measure the limits of musical memory. Concerning longevity, older adults can show excellent retention of music learned decades previously (Bartlett and Snelus 1981; Rubin et al. 1998). Even early-stage Alzheimer’s disease patients can almost perfectly discriminate familiar tunes such as patriotic and holiday songs from musically similar but unfamiliar tunes (Bartlett et al. 1995). And this memory can persist not just for songs that have words, but also for purely melodic motives, and without much context. For instance, it is not uncommon to turn on the radio and hear just a few notes of a tune, and be able immediately to hum along or at least recognize the tune as familiar.

Studies of aging and face recognition show age-related increases in false recognitions of new faces. To explore implications of this false alarm effect, we had young and senior adults perform (1) three eye-witness identification tasks, using both target present and target absent lineups, and (2) and old/new recognition task in which a study list of faces was followed by a test including old and new faces, along with conjunctions of old faces. Compared with the young, seniors had lower accuracy and higher choosing rates on the lineups, and they also falsely recognized more new faces on the recognition test. However, after screening for perceptual processing deficits, there was no age difference in false recognition of conjunctions, or in discriminating old faces from conjunctions. We conclude that the false alarm effect generalizes to lineup identification, but does not extend to conjunction faces. The findings are consistent with age-related deficits in recollection of context and relative age invariance in perceptual integrative processes underlying the experience of familiarity.

Two experiments examined affect-dependent memory with preschool/kindergarten and third-grade children. A two-list intentional learning procedure was used to assess the effects of the congruent versus incongruent relationship between affect (happy vs sad) during initial list learning and affect (happy vs sad) during a delayed recall test. When induction of emotional mood was preceded by relaxation exercises in Experiment 1, no evidence of affect dependence was observed. When the relaxation procedure was omitted in Experiment 2, the affect-dependent pattern was obtained in both free recall and cued recall for both age groups. The results of Experiment 2 show that affect-dependent memory is a reasonably robust phenomenon in children and that hypnosis is not necessary for its appearance. However, the phenomenon is apparently absent under conditions of relaxation, a result consistent with two-factor theories of emotion.

Differences in the ability of young adults and elderly to recognize faces were examined under two conditions. In a standard single-view condition, in which each input face was shown as one photograph, we confirmed prior findings that young adults perform better than the elderly at distinguishing photographs seen before from photographs of new faces. We also found that the elderly had more trouble distinguishing photographs seen before from photographs of(l) old faces changed in facial expression and (2) old faces changed in expression and pose. Yet there were no reliable age differences in distinguishing old-but-changed faces from entirely new faces. In a more naturalistic multi-view condition, in which each input face was shown in four poses and with two expressions, no age differences were found. A second experiment ruled out the possibility that varied repetition, by itself, removes age differences in recognizing faces. These data supported age differences in remembering facial expressions and possibly other details of photographs of faces, but not in remembering faces perse.

Two experiments examined memory for the lateral orientation of scenic pictures by young and elderly adults. In Experiment 1, an input list of pictures was followed by a test demanding discrimination between (a) targets versus reversed copies of input items, or (b) targets versus new pictures which verbally resembled input items. The age-related difference was reliably larger in the former task than in the latter. Experiment 2 compared incidental versus intentional acquisition of orientation under conditions of short (1 second) and long (5 second) presentation of pictures at input. With short presentation, though not with long presentation, intentional instructions reliably impaired orientation memory. With both presentation times, robust age-related differences were obtained. The results suggest an age-related deficit in truly non-intentional encoding of orientation, and pose a challenge for capacity theories of memory across the lifespan.

Four experiments examined the role of verbal information in recognition memory for complex, scenic photographs. At input, subjects performed a communication-oriented verbalization task or one of several varieties of a nonverbal task. Verbalization subjects out-performed others in a subsequent “resemblance” test which required recognition of both previously presented items and verbally similar “same-scene” or left/right-reversed items. However, verbalization did not improve discrimination between input pictures and their verbally similar mates in a “discrimination” test. Subjects were apparently able to control the weight given to verbal versus nonverbal information in meeting demands of the recognition tests. Experiment 4 suggested differences in the retrieval characteristics of verbal and nonverbal information, supporting one version of a dual-trace theory.

The present study explored the relationships between trait and state test anxiety of students, and comprehension and recognition memory for sentences. The results demonstrated that test anxiety effects could be found in comprehension-based recognition memory for sentences under conditions that minimized complex retrieval operations. Comprehension was related to the test anxiety deficit, supporting the hypothesis that anxiety-recognition relations were mediated by anxiety-comprehension and comprehension-recognition relations. However, a partial correlation analysis suggested that this comprehension-deficit hypothesis is not adequate to explain the total deficit. Elaborative processes were suggested as a potential contributor to the findings.

Publisher Summary The ecological approach has become well-established in the domain traditionally known as "perception." Opposition to memory as a theoretical construct implies no judgment that the problems o f memory are unimportant or impossible to address. People do show the phenomena of remembering and forgetting, and there is no denying the necessity of understanding just how and why such phenomena occur. The issues raised by ecologically-oriented writers concern the concepts one use to understand the phenomena of memory—the challenge posed by the ecological approach is to conceptualize these phenomena without reliance on the notion of memory "stores" containing countless numbers of "engrams," "images," "traces," etc. The ecological approach to memory phenomena might be made comparable with the concept of schemata. The empirical phenomena of coherence and fusion led to conclude that "events can be primary units of analysis," and that these "events are natural wholes that are, so-to-speak, perceived through the slides (of a picture sequence), rather than built up from the slides."

Two experiments investigated the role of verbalization in memory for environmental sounds. Experiment i extended earlier research (Bower & Holyoak, 1973) showing that sound recognition is highly dependent upon consistent verbal interpretation at input and test. While such a finding implies an important role for verbalization, Experiment 2 suggested that verbalization is not the only efficacious strategy for encoding environmental sounds. Recognition after presentation of sounds was shown to differ qualitatively from recognition after presentation of sounds accompanied with interpretative verbal labels and from recognition after presentation of verbal labels alone. The results also suggest that encoding physical information about sounds is of greater importance for sound recognition than for verbal free recall, and that verbalization is of greater importance for free recall than for recognition. Several alternative frameworks for the results are presented, and separate retrieval and discrimination processes in recognition are proposed.

BARTLETT, JAMES C., and SANTROCK, JOHN W. Affect-Dependent Episodic Memory in Young Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1979, 50, 513-518. An experiment on memory with 5-year-old children tested the hypothesis that a change in affect between input and test interferes with performance in a nominally noncued free recall test but not with performance on a cued recall test. Affect at input was manipulated through an experimenter's behavior as well as the affective tone of stories in which 18 critical words were embedded. Affect at test was manipulated through a second experimenter's behavior as well as through presentation of 6 pictures which subjects viewed just prior to beginning recall. Free recall of the critical words showed the state-dependent effect while cued recall and recognition of these words did not. The results are consistent with prior studies of drug-induced states in adults and suggest that a change in affect can interfere with childrens' ability to generate internal retrieval cues in free recall.

Middle-aged and elderly subjects heard melodyand title-cues for popular songs dating from 1921 to 1974. Subjects made familiarity and time-ofpopularity judgments, and, when a cue was recognized, they attempted lyric recall and estimated when the song was last heard. Two findings indicate that performance was based on very long term memory: Middle-aged subjects made relatively few recognition responses to songs from the twenties and thirties (when they were unborn or very young) while older subjects did not show this trend, and the last-heard judgments of all subjects were highly correlated with actual year-of-popularity. The major findings were that (a) cued recall of lyrics was higher in response to melodies than in response to titles, while temporal judgments showed no effect of cue and (b) temporal placement of a song was more accurate when recognized than when not recognized, even when lyrics were not recalled. The results suggest that accurate lifespan memory for popular songs exists, and that temporal judgments are based on episodic memory for information at least partially independent of lyric representations.