It is well established that performance in free-recall is mediated by an individual's ability to reinstate the study-context during retrieval. This notion is supported by an abundance of evidence and is reflected in prominent models of memory. Introspectively, however, we often feel that a memory just 'pops into mind' and its recall is not accompanied by contextual detail. Here we ask whether t...

INTRODUCTION Recent reviews showed that Ginkgo biloba extract EGb 761(1) is effective to enhance performance in patients with cognitive impairment (e.g., dementia). The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of EGb 761 on memory and the specificity of such effects on distinct memory functions in middle-aged healthy volunteers. METHODS A total of 188 healthy subjects aged 45-56 years...

Roediger and McDermott (1995) recently re-introduced a paradigm to study the creation of false memories. Subjects hear short lists of related words (e.g., thread, pin, eye, sewing, etc.), all of which are associates of a critical nonpresented word (e.g., needle); on a free recall test given immediately after list presentation, subjects often erroneously recall the critical nonpresented word. Th...

OBJECTIVE Relatively little research has directly evaluated the schematic nature of illness representations proposed by the common sense model of illness. Four studies tested the hypothesis that illness schema activation leads directly and automatically to behavioral manifestations of illness. METHOD Study 1 was a survey (N = 970) that evaluated the proposition that the mental representation ...

In the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, subjects study lists of words that are designed to elicit the recall of an associatively related critical item. The 55 lists we have developed provide levels of false recall ranging from .01 to .65, and understanding this variability should provide a key to understanding this memory illusion. Using a simultaneous multiple regression analysis, we a...

Expectations learned from our environment are known to exert strong influences on episodic memory. Furthermore, people have prior expectations for universal color labels and their associated hue space—a salient property of the environment. In three experiments, we assessed peoples’ color naming preferences, and expectation for color. Using a novel experimental paradigm, we then assessed free re...

According to the retrieved context theory of episodic memory, the cue for recall of an item is a weighted sum of recently activated cognitive states, including previously recalled and studied items as well as their associations. We show that this theory predicts there should be compound cuing in free recall. Specifically, the temporal contiguity effect should be greater when the 2 most recently...