The Apolipoprotein epsilon 4 (APOE ε4) genetic variant is notoriously linked to enhanced risk of developing Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Several studies have examined how this allele could influence cognitive functioning in healthy adults, and whether ε4 carriers show a subtle cognitive decline that would indicate preclinical AD pathology. Research has predominantly focused on episodic memory, where ε4 carriers are usually impaired, while semantic memory functioning has received less attention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Mental distress is present in a significant proportion of people with epilepsy (PWE), with a negative impact across life domains. It is underdiagnosed and under-treated despite guidelines recommending screening for its presence (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Some authors report steeper slopes of forgetting in early Alzheimer's disease (AD), while others do not. Contrasting findings are thought to be due to methodological inconsistencies or variety of testing methods, yet they also emerge when people are assessed on the same testing procedure.
Objective: We aimed to assess if forgetting slopes of people with mild cognitive impairment due to AD (MCI-AD) are different from age-matched healthy controls (HC) by using a prose paradigm.
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFQ J Exp Psychol (Hove)
June 2023
Temporary feature bindings can be learned under specific experimental conditions. However, how this learning occurs and how it is forgotten over long intervals is unclear. We addressed this question with repeated presentation of an array of coloured shapes followed by verbal free recall after delays of 1 day, 1 week, and 1 month.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn a seminal study, Slamecka and McElree showed that the degree of initial learning of verbal material affected the intercepts but not the slopes of forgetting curves. However, more recent work has reported that memories for central events (gist) and memory for secondary details (peripheral) were forgotten at different rates over periods of days, with gist memory retained more consistently over time than details. The present experiments aimed to investigate whether qualitatively different types of memory scoring (gist vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRetrieval is greater if new learning is followed by a period of wakeful rest, minimising the likelihood of retroactive interference. It is not known if this benefit extends to recollection of both gist and peripheral details, nor whether age affects the benefit of wakeful resting in either of these types of recollection. Forty-five younger and forty older adults were presented with prose passages for later recall followed by a period of either interference or wakeful resting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe 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.
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