Judith A. Hudson

Acquisition of spatial knowledge for routes

Abstract An important issue in the study of spatial knowledge has been the distinction between configurational and route knowledge. Route knowledge is characterized by the knowledge of sequential locations without the knowledge of general interrelationships. In contrast, configurational knowledge is characterized by the ability to generalize beyond learned routes and locate objects within a general frame of reference. These two types of knowledge are contrasted in a learning experiment, in which subjects acquire spatial information either from a map or a slide presentation. Furthermore, the structure of their spatial knowledge is derived from free-recall data using the ordered tree clustering algorithm. The results show, first, that subjects in the map condition acquired more accurate configurational knowledge. Second, we found that route knowledge can be acquired either through route presentation or map presentation. Third, there are individual differences within the slide group, such that some subjects were able to acquire configurational knowledge. And fourth, ordered trees are able to account for some of these differences, and thus identify the degree of configurational knowledge acquired by the slide subjects.

Planning in the preschool years: The emergence of plans from general event knowledge

Abstract A framework for conceptualizing the relationship between event knowledge and planning is proposed, and two experiments are reported that examined childrens ability to draw on event knowledge in planning. Preschool children were asked to plan and execute shopping trips to a pretend grocery store. Half of the children planned for two events on successive trials (Level 1, single-goal planning) and half of the children planned for two events simultaneously (Level 2, multiple-event planning). The amount of external support for planning was also manipulated. In Experiment 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were presented with either a clustered or interleaved display. In Experiment 2, 3- and 4-year-olds were given adult assistance in plan construction. Results indicated that childrens planning becomes more complex and flexible with age. Older children also rely less on external supports for planning. However, when external support was provided, 3- and 4-year-olds displayed higher-level planning abilities. Results are discussed in terms of the roles of event knowledge and external support in the early development of planning skills.

Reactivation of Toddlers' Event Memory

Toddlers of 14 and 18 months learned to produce target actions for six activities, were allowed to forget their training, and were reminded of the activities 8 or 10 weeks later, depending on their age. Reminders were administered in a memory-reactivation paradigm in which toddlers were shown the target actions of three of the six activities but were not allowed to imitate the modelled actions. Toddlers were tested for their recall of all six activities 24 hours after the reactivation treatment. Toddlers who were passively exposed to three activities during the reactivation session recalled more activities than controls who either were not reminded or did not originally engage in the activities. This study reveals that 14- and 18-month-olds encode components of an event associatively and that they are able to remember seemingly forgotten components through passive re-exposure to other components of the event.

The time travelling self: comparing self and other in narratives of past and future events.

Mental time travel research emphasizes the connection between past and future thinking, whereas autobiographical memory research emphasizes the interrelationship of self and memory. This study explored the relationship between self and memory when thinking about both past and future events. Participants reported events from the near and distant past and future, for themselves, a close friend, or an acquaintance. Past events were rated higher in phenomenological quality than future events, and near self events were rated higher in quality than those about friends. Although future events were more positive than past events, only valence ratings for self and close friend showed a linear increase in positivity from distant past to future. Content analysis showed that this increase in positivity could not be ascribed to choosing events from the cultural life script. These findings provide evidence for the role of personal goals in imagining the future.

The Development of Episodic Foresight: Emerging Concepts and Methods

Episodic foresight is here defined as the ability to project oneself into the future and mentally simulate situations and outcomes. Tasks used to study the development of episodic foresight in young children are reviewed and compared to tasks used to study other future-oriented abilities (planning, delay of gratification, and prospective memory) in the same age-group. We argue for the importance of accounting for and minimizing the role of other cognitive demands in research tasks. Because episodic foresight is an emerging ability in young children, more research needs to be directed at the contexts in which it emerges and the extent to which episodic foresight is part of a growing ability for mental representation.

Children's Use of Scripts in Inferential Text Processing.

This study compared preschool and first‐grade childrens ability to make three types of inferences: script‐based inferences derived from schematically organized event knowledge, invited inferences derived from general world knowledge, and logical inferences based on conditional reasoning. Children listened to brief stories about familiar events, recalled the stories, and answered inference questions about the stories. When recall of relevant text information was controlled, preschool children were better able to make script‐based inferences than both invited and logical inferences, whereas first‐graders were better able to draw script‐based and invited inferences than logical inferences. These results suggest that the development of childrens ability to draw inferences is due, in part, to the development of the knowledge base. Preschool childrens event knowledge allows them to make script‐based inferences in text comprehension before they are able to make either invited or logical inferences.

Self-enhancement and the life script in future thinking across the lifespan

Studies comparing memory and future event simulation find that future events are more positive, and more often depend on life script events (e.g., culturally normative landmark events) than past events. Previous research does not address the link between this positivity bias and the life stage of college-age participants or their reliance on these scripted events. To examine this positivity bias, narratives of past and anticipated future events were elicited from participants aged 18–74 years, and were examined for reliance on the life script and valence ratings. Results showed that, across age groups, future events were rated as more positive than past events, and that life script events were common in the distant future. Notably, whereas younger adult age groups wrote primarily about their own life script events, older participants more commonly wrote about attending the life script events of significant others, such as children and grandchildren. These findings suggest that simulated future events play a valuable role in self-enhancement across the lifespan. Furthermore, the life script can be viewed as a useful search mechanism when one is missing the episodic details that are more available in memories; however, it is not the source of positivity bias for future events.

The development of future thinking: Young children's ability to construct event sequences to achieve future goals

Previous studies suggest that the ability to think about and act on the future emerges between 3 and 5 years of age. However, it is unclear what underlying processes change during the development of early future-oriented behavior. We report three experiments that tested the emergence of future thinking ability through childrens ability to explicitly maintain future goals and construct future scenarios. Our main objectives were to examine the effects of goal structure and the effects of working memory demands on childrens ability to construct future scenarios and make choices to satisfy future goals. The results indicate that 4-year-olds were able to successfully accomplish two temporally ordered goals even with high working memory demands and a complex goal structure, whereas 3-year-olds were able to accomplish two goals only when the working memory demands were low and the goal structure did not involve additional demands from inferential reasoning and contingencies between the temporally ordered goals. Results are discussed in terms of the development of future thinking in conjunction with working memory, inferential reasoning ability, and goal maintenance abilities.

The self in autobiographical memory: Effects of self-salience on narrative content and structure

Contemporary models of autobiographical memory attribute a prominent role to the conceptualisation of the self. In an attempt to better understand the impact of the self as an organising feature of autobiographical memory, narratives of personal episodes were elicited, either after a questionnaire about the self (self-prime condition) or after a distractor task (control condition). Participants also wrote a narrative of a turning-point memory, which is by definition a self-focused narrative. Narratives were divided into propositions and analysed for the types of statements used. As predicted, when writing self-focused turning-point narratives participants included more statements relating to the meaning of an event and connecting it to the self, and fewer statements focusing on the who, what, where, and when of the narrative. Narratives written after the self-prime also demonstrated characteristics that were similar to turning-point narratives, although not on all measures. This shift in narrative focus in turning-point and self-primed memory narratives indicates an increased attempt to fulfil goals of coherence rather than correspondence (Conway, 2005). These findings lend insight into the nature of the relationship between the semantic conceptualisation of the self, and the process of retrieving event-specific knowledge in episodic memory.

Agency Detection in God Concepts: Essential, Situational, and Individual Factors

AbstractWe investigate how current models of the conceptual representation of God as highly agentive have consequences for how the God concept is processed in memory for stories when God is not presented as specifically agentive. Participants read stories describing a person experiencing a potentially harmful situation, avoiding the harm, and then thanking either God or luck. Results indicate significant differences between recall of the God and luck stories: God was recalled more often, recalled with intentional language, and God stories were recalled with more intrusions than luck stories. However, results indicate no differences between God and luck story recall on a subsequent recognition task. Participants’ religious identity correlated with both recall and recognition scores. Findings are taken as evidence of a God concept that is represented as highly agentive, and differences between the recognition and recall task reflect differences between intuitive and explicit theology. Results further our knowledge about the way conceptual representation of the supernatural can influence text processing, and suggest ways in which the perception of agency can be influenced.