Antônio Jaeger

Passwords Usage and Human Memory Limitations: A Survey across Age and Educational Background

The present article reports a survey conducted to identify the practices on passwords usage, focusing particularly on memory limitations and the use of passwords across individuals with different age and education backgrounds. A total of 263 participants were interviewed, with ages ranging from 18 to 93 years, and education level ranging from grade school to graduate degree. Contrary to our expectations, effects of cognitive decline due to aging were not observed on memory performance for passwords. The results suggested instead, that the number of password uses was the most influential factor on memory performance. That is, as the number of circumstances in which individuals utilized passwords increased, the incidence of forgotten and mixed-up passwords also increased. The theoretical significance of these findings and their implications for good practices on password usage are discussed.

Estudo comparativo da aquisição da escrita em crianças e em adultos

This study has aimed to verify if there are significant differences in the decoding of written language using a 10-word dictation with children and adults. The sample was constituted by 32 subjects, divided in two groups: 16 children and 16 adults. They were all in the second grade level of literacy. To analyze the data, the spelling mistakes probabilities and their relationships to sound-letter were observed. The results showed that the adult group had the highest mistake rate, which implies that adults had more difficulty than children to solve the proposed task.

A Psicologia Evolucionista e os domínios da cognição social

The study of social cognition came to prominence with the rise of Cognitive Psychology in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The expression refers to the processes that subserve behavior in response to other individuals. This paper analyses a new approach of social cognition based on Evolutionary Psychology. The authors describe some aspects related to the phylogeny of human cognition. The bibliographical review of this research considered the 1975-2006 period and included articles and books about this subject. The present paper also explains the main mechanisms that are products of natural selection and that appeared to solve social life problems in human evolutionary history. In the last part, the importance of this approach is discussed.

Recognition of emotional words: Response time effects of novelty.

Several studies have investigated potential interactions between emotion and memory by focusing on analyses of accuracy and response bias. These studies typically show higher accuracy and laxer response bias to emotional relative to neutral words. Fewer studies, however, have examined interactions between emotion and memory by focusing on response time data. Here, we report a recognition memory experiment in which emotional words, neutral words, and semantically related neutral words were used as probes. Participants were slower to reject novel emotional words than to reject novel neutral words, whereas they exhibited equivalent response times to emotional and neutral studied words. Quantile analysis showed that such slower rejection of emotional novel words was restricted to slower responses, suggesting potential interactions between emotion and higher order processes during recognition. These findings are interpreted in light of affective theories of exposure and theories of emotional processing.