OBJECTIVE The more people retrieve childhood memories, the less favourably they evaluate their own memory. It has been argued that this might play a role in self-reports of amnesia. However, a limitation of previous studies addressing this phenomenon is that participants' judgments about their memory were based on a single item. DESIGN Students were randomly assigned to either of two conditio...

This study examined the types of strategies people use to verify putative childhood memories and the degree to which their preferred strategies are restricted in typical memory implantation studies. We asked subjects to describe a situation in which they recalled a false childhood experience and a hypothetical situation in which they pretended to have developed a false memory after taking part ...

Studies in animals showed that stress results in damage to the hippocampus, a brain area involved in learning and memory, with associated memory deficits. The mechanism involves glucocorticoids and possibly serotonin acting through excitatory amino acids to mediate hippocampal atrophy. Patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from Vietnam combat and childhood abuse had deficits on neu...

Using a framework that distinguishes autobiographical belief, recollective experience, and confidence in memory, we review three major paradigms used to suggest false childhood events to adults: imagination inflation, false feedback and memory implantation. Imagination inflation and false feedback studies increase the belief that a suggested event occurred by a small amount such that events are...

Autobiographical memory is malleable, but how much can we change people's beliefs and memories about the past? We approached this question with a method designed to supply subjects with a highly personalized suggestion about what probably happened in their childhood. In the current study, one group of subjects (the `Dream' subjects) had their dreams interpreted to indicate that they had experie...

Apolipoprotein E (APOE) genotype is a possible influence on nonpathological cognitive aging. The authors studied 462 community-dwelling, 79-year-old people born in 1921, whose childhood IQ had been assessed in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 (Scottish Council for Research in Education, 1933). Adjusting for sex, childhood IQ, and self-reported illnesses, the authors found that those with an A...

This paper attempts to explore the Bosnian war diaries, Zlata’s Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo (2006) by Zlata Filipovic (1980- ) and My Childhood under Fire: Diary written Nadja Halilbegovich (1979- ). Both diaries provide an insight into genocide everyday life of children amid war. bear witness horrific events their country create a concrete collective memory Drawing on trauma theo...

Recent meta-analyses point towards a pathogenic role of the Val66Met variant of the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in major depressive disorder, specifically in males. We investigated whether BDNF Val66Met shows a male-specific interaction with childhood stressful life events on affective memory bias, a cognitive susceptibility factor for depression. Healthy volunteers (n=430; 272 fem...

Research on the functional meaning of EEG frequency bands during memory processing has only examined two developmental periods: infancy and from late childhood to adulthood. The purpose of this study was to examine changes in EEG power for three toddler EEG frequency bands (3-5Hz, 6-9Hz, 10-12Hz) during a verbal recall task. To this end, we asked three questions: (a) Which frequency band(s) dis...

46 Previous research has documented an association between executive functioning (EF) and 47 memory for bound details. However, it is unknown if this relation varies as a function of the type 48 of bound information (i.e., unitized versus non-unitized) and whether this association changes as 49 a function of age during childhood, when both EF and memory undergo rapid development. The 50 current...