Electrophysiological studies in animals have shown coordinated reactivation of neuronal ensembles during a restricted time period of behavioral inactivity that immediately followed active encoding. In the present study we directly investigated off-line processing of associative memory formation in the human brain. Subjects' regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) as a surrogate marker of neural act...

We describe a personalized and scalable system for testing of autobiographical memory (specifically, the recall of names) using email archives. We have developed a novel system that creates a personalized test by analyzing the subject’s sent email messages over the past year. The system generates fill-in-the-blank questions from the user’s messages, with the answers being names determined to be...

Recognition memory was tested for lists of 6 briefly (0.08 s) presented pictures at different interstimulus intervals (ISI) of 0.08, 1, and 4 s. Experiment 1 showed a 16% performance increase (ISI effect) for increasing ISI for travel slide but not kaleidoscope pictures. Experiment 2 showed that learning names for the kaleidoscope pictures then resulted in a substantial (20%) ISI effect, not at...

A common complaint of older adults is that they have trouble remembering names, even the names of people they know well. Two experiments examining this problem are reported in the present article. Experiment I tested episodic memory for surnames and occupations; older adults and younger adults under divided attention performed less well than did full attention younger adults, but showed no disp...

Most theories of coreference specify linguistic factors that modulate antecedent accessibility in memory; however, whether non-linguistic factors also affect coreferential access is unknown. Here we examined the impact of a non-linguistic generation task (letter transposition) on the repeated-name penalty, a processing difficulty observed when coreferential repeated names refer to syntactically...

Memory for faces and names has increasingly become a focus of cognitive assessment and research in Alzheimer's disease (AD). This paper reviews evidence from cognitive and clinical neuroscience regarding the question of whether AD is associated with a specific deficit in face recognition, face-name association, and retrieval of semantic information and names. Cognitive approaches conceptualizin...

Many older adults are interested in strategies to help them learn new names. We examined the learning conditions that provide maximal benefit to name and face learning. In Experiment 1, consistent with levels-of-processing theory, name recall and recognition by 20 younger and 20 older adults was poorest with physical processing, intermediate with phonemic processing, and best with semantic proc...

Two recent lines of research suggest that explicitly naming objects at study influences subsequent memory for those objects at test. Lupyan (2008) suggested that naming impairs memory by a representational shift of stored representations of named objects toward the prototype (labeling effect). MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, and Ozubko (2010) and MacLeod, Ozubko, Forrin, and Hourihan (submitte...