When reading a narrative, comprehension and retention of information benefit considerably from the use of situation models--coherent representations of the characters, locations, and activities described in the text. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the neural mechanisms supporting situation model processing. Participants read blocks of sentences that were ei...

Lake Qooqa in Oromia/Ethiopia started out as a man-made lake back the 1960s, formed by damming of Awash River and other rivers for practical function, i.e., hydroelectric power. The flooded over surrounding picturesque landscape, shattered sacred sites livelihoods Siiba Oromo, damaged ecosystem area, which was later resuscitated to have an aesthetic function tourists. Available sources showed t...

Story statements cluster into episodes, so we expected the memory representations of statements to cluster into separate episode chunks in memory. Experiment 1 confirmed this chunking idea by showing that the recall of episode actions depends on the length of that episode, but not on the lengths of other episodes. Specifically, adding more actions to an episode increased recall of the original ...

Flashbacks are involuntary, emotion-laden images experienced by individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The qualities of flashbacks could under certain circumstances lead to source memory errors. Participants with PTSD wrote a trauma narrative and reported the experience of flashbacks. They were later presented with stimuli from flashback and non-flashback parts of their narrativ...

Does the default mode network (DMN) reconfigure to encode information about the changing environment? This question has proven difficult, because patterns of functional connectivity reflect a mixture of stimulus-induced neural processes, intrinsic neural processes and non-neuronal noise. Here we introduce inter-subject functional correlation (ISFC), which isolates stimulus-dependent inter-regio...

In the encoding of narrative episodes, the hippocampus exhibits memory-predictive activity time-locked to stimulus offset. In real life, however, events usually occur in succession, raising the question of how the immediate offline processing of one event is affected by presentation of another. To address this issue, participants were presented with brief narrative movie clips in a functional m...

A major concern regarding the study of narratives regards how they are indexed and retrieved. This is a question which touches on the structure of human memory in general. Indeed, if narratives capture the substance of human thought, then data that we have already collected regarding human memory is of central importance to the computational study of narrative. Fuzzy Trace Theory assumes that m...

Deficits in verbal working memory (vWM) have often been reported in children with Specific Language Impairments (SLIs) and might significantly contribute to their linguistic difficulties. The linguistic and narrative skills of a group of children with diagnosis of SLI were compared to those of a group of children with typical development. The linguistic assessment included a comprehensive analy...

Memory for complex everyday events involving vision, hearing, smell, emotion, narrative, and language cannot be understood without considering the properties of the separate systems that process and store each of these forms of information. Using this premise as a starting point, my colleagues and I found that visual memory plays a central role in autobiographical memory: The strength of recoll...