Psychiatry and Psychology Commons^™

Describing Individual Incidents Of Sexual Abuse: A Review Of Research On The Effects Of Multiple Sources Of Information On Children’S Reports, Kim P. Roberts, Martine B. Powell

Psychology Faculty Publications

Objective. For successful prosecution of child sexual abuse, children are often required to provide reports about individual, alleged incidents. Although verbally or mentally rehearsing memory of an incident can strengthen memories, children’s report of individual incidents can also be contaminated when they experience other events related to the individual incidents (e.g., informal interviews, dreams of the incident) and/or when they have similar, repeated experiences of an incident as in cases of multiple abuse.

Method. Research is reviewed on the positive and negative effects of these related experiences on the length, accuracy, and structure of children’s reports of a particular incident. …

Nicotine Enhances Acquisition Of A T-Maze Visual Discrimination: Assessment Of Individual Differences, J. Besheer, Rick A. Bevins

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

In the present report, rats' performance was assessed in five tasks designed to measure behavioral response to different novel stimuli under different experimental situations. Daily nicotine treatment (0, 0.3 or l.0 mg/kg) began after the conclusion of the behavioral tasks and continued throughout the experiment. Training of a T-maze visual discrimination task commenced after 11 days of nicotine pretreatment. As a group, rats treated with the higher dose of nicotine (l.0 mg/kg) made fewer errors to acquire the initial T-maze discrimination than saline-treated controls. Activity induced by an inescapable novel environment (i.e. first behavioral screen) was positively correlated with the …

Processing Strategies And Recall Performance For Narrative Passages And Word Lists Of Negative And Neutral Affective Valence In Depression, Lora L. Sloan

Theses and Dissertations

Depressed individuals have been found to exhibit memory deficits on tasks that require effortful processing. They have also been found to remember negative materials better than their nondepressed cohorts. While these findings are well-documented, there have been few studies designed to examine how and why these differences in recall occur. The present study examined prose passage and word list recall in depressed and nondepressed college students. Processing times and structure of recall were also examined to assist in determining how material was processed and remembered. Half of the passages and word lists utilized were of negative affective valence and half …

Memory For Tune Titles After Organized Or Unorganized Presentation, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

Two experiments investigated the structure of memory for titles of 54 familiar tunes. The titles were presented in the form of a hierarchy, with nodes labeled by genre (e.g., Rock or Patriotic). Four groups of subjects received logical or randomized titles, and logical or randomized labels. Goodness of label and title structure had equal and additive beneficial effects on recall with a 3-min exposure of the stimuli. With a 4-min exposure, good title structure became a larger contributor to good recall. Clustering analyses suggested that subjects were mentally representing the tune titles hierarchically, even when presentation was random.

Organization In Memory For Familiar Songs, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

Investigated the organizing principles in memory for familiar songs in 2 experiments. It was hypothesized that individuals do not store and remember each song in isolation. Rather, there exists a rich system of relationships among tunes that can be revealed through similarity rating studies and memory tasks. One initial assumption was the division of relations among tunes into musical (e.g., tempo, rhythm) and nonmusical similarity. In Exp I, 20 undergraduates were asked to sort 60 familiar tunes into groups according to both musical and nonmusical criteria. Clustering analyses showed clear patterns of nonmusical similarity but few instances of musical similarity. …

Musical Expertise And Melodic Structure In Memory For Musical Notation, Andrea R. Halpern, Gordon H. Bower

Faculty Journal Articles

Two experiments plus a pilot investigated the role of melodic structure on short-term memory for musical notation by musicians and nonmusicians. In the pilot experiment, visually similar melodies that had been rated as either "good" or "bad" were presented briefly, followed by a 15-sec retention interval and then recall. Musicians remembered good melodies better than they remembered bad ones: nonmusicians did not distinguish between them. In the second experiment, good, bad, and random melodies were briefly presented, followed by immediate recall. The advantage of musicians over nonmusicians decreased as the melody type progressed from good to bad to random. In …

State-Dependent Learning As A Function Of The Temporal Relationship Between Noncontingent Footshock And Electroconvulsive Shock, T. Scott Shutt

All Master's Theses

Rats were given a noncontingent footshock followed at various intervals by electroconvulsive shock. Twentyfour hours later they were trained on a non-shock passive avoidance task and tested for retention 72 hours later. When the interval between NCFS and ECS was short the animals showed an amnesia which reduced as the interval was lengthened. An interval of .5 seconds produced the most pronounced amnesia and intervals greater than 10 seconds produced virtually no amnesia. The results were consistent with a state dependent retrieval failure hypothesis.

A Comparison Of Ecs And Drug Induced State-Dependent Learning, Mayse F. John

All Master's Theses

The purpose of the present experiment is twofold: (a) to determine if FS and ECS or just ECS can be used as an agent to produce "dissociated" learning in a multi-trial procedure, and (b) if shown, to determine the effectiveness of these agents relative to three different dosages of sodium pentobarbital preselected to produce no, moderate, and complete dissociation.