Laura A. Thompson

Context-Dependent Memory under Stressful Conditions: The Case of Skydiving

Two experiments examined the effect of differing levels of emotional arousal on learning and memory for words in matching and mismatching contexts. In Experiment 1, experienced skydivers learned words either in the air or on the ground and recalled them in the same context or in the other context. Experiment 2 replicated the stimuli and design of the first experiment except that participants were shown a skydiving video in lieu of skydiving. Recall was poor in air-learning conditions with actual skydiving, but when lists were learned on land, recall was higher in the matching context than in the mismatching context. In the skydiving video experiment, recall was higher in matching learn-recall contexts regardless of the situation in which learning occurred. We propose that under extremely emotionally arousing circumstances, environmental and/or mood cues are unlikely to become encoded or linked to newly acquired information and thus cannot serve as cues to retrieval. Results can be applied to understanding variations in context-dependent memory in occupations (e.g., police, military special operations, and Special Weapons and Tactics teams) in which the worker experiences considerable emotional stress while learning or recalling new information.

Lifespan Differences in the Social Networks of Prison Inmates

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) (Carstensen, 1992, 1993) accounts for lifespan changes in human social networks and for the motivations which underlie those changes. SST is applied in this research with 256 prison inmates and non-inmates, ages 18–84, from Mississippi, Kansas, and New Mexico. Two research questions sought to identify (a) whether inmate networks change in size, and (b) whether overall closeness within an inmates network changes over the adult years. Results indicate that older inmates, much like older non-inmates, have few peripheral partners, are buffered from the wider population of prisoners, and interact within a small group of very close partners. Although older inmates are not completely isolated, they do maintain fewer network partners as age increases, like their non-incarcerated counterparts, and overall are as emotionally close to network members as non-inmates.

Lie‐biased Decision Making in Prison

Levine and McCornack (1992) found that persons who have a truth‐bias (those who tend to believe that most messages are truthful) exhibit low detection accuracy, that moderately suspicious people are more accurate at detecting, and suggested that lie‐bias persons would be as inaccurate at detecting lies as those who are truth‐biased. This study tested Levine and McCornack’s suggestion that lie‐biased people would be inaccurate deception detectors by conducting field experiments in Kansas and New Mexico prisons. Results indicate that prisoners are lie‐biased and are accurate detectors of lies but not truths, and findings suggest a reversed veracity effect in prison.

Adult age effects of plausibility on memory: the role of time constraints during encoding.

We investigated the role of training-induced knowledge schemas and encoding time on adult age differences in recall. High-plausible (schema coherent) words were recalled better than low-plausible (schema discrepant) words in both age groups. This difference was larger for old adults than for young adults for presentation times ranging from 3 s to 11 s per word. After equating participants in overall recall (i.e., at 50% correct) by dynamic adjustment of presentation time, old adults again showed a stronger plausibility effect than young adults when recall was above criterion. In a second experiment with self-paced encoding, old adults used more time than young adults only for low-plausible pairs, yet they still remembered fewer of them. In a third experiment, both age groups preferred to imagine high- rather than low-plausible words, but this effect was more pronounced in old adults. The results indicate that, compared with young adults, old adults find it particularly difficult to form elaborative mental images of schema-discrepant information under a wide variety of time constraints during encoding. Results are discussed in relation to explanations based on age-related mental slowing.

Increases in cortisol are positively associated with gains in encoding and maintenance working memory performance in young men

Abstract Past studies have demonstrated that increases in cortisol secretion are associated with either enhancements or impairments of long-term memory, depending on the subprocess involved. However, working memory is generally studied as a unified system within the cortisol literature. The present study sought to determine if cortisol increases are positively associated with increases in performance in the encoding subprocess of working memory, and whether increases are positively or negatively associated with performance changes in the maintenance subprocess. Thirty-three young men (M = 19.4 years, SD = 0.89) participated in a change-detection task, consisting of a condition requiring encoding only and a condition requiring both encoding and maintenance. To elicit a cortisol response, participants completed the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) between two administrations of the task. Cardiovascular measurements and saliva samples were obtained before the TSST (T1), and mid-way between blocks of the second administration of the change-detection task (T2), to measure autonomic and cortisol responses to the TSST evident during the second change-detection task. Cortisol increases between T1 and T2 were positively correlated with both encoding (r(32) = 0.503, p = 0.003) and maintenance (r(32) = 0.463, p = 0.007) performance. This is a novel finding as previous studies have shown an impairing effect of cortisol on working memory. The positive relation between cortisol and working memory has likely been obscured in previous tasks, which did not examine these specific subprocesses in isolation from each other. The beneficial role of cortisol in the stress response is discussed.

Post‐probe decision making in a prison context

If a listener becomes suspicious during a conversation, and asks questions (probes) of a speaker, the listener tends to judge the speakers message as honest. This result has been termed the probing effect (McCornack, Levine, Aleman, Oetzel, & Miller, 1991). This study hypothesized that an untested decision‐making phenomenon, an opposite probing effect, or a post‐probe tendency to judge a message as deceptive, might occur when lie‐biased individuals judge statement veracity. Prison inmates and non‐inmates participated in dyads as judges and speakers. Speakers watched a video, and then lied or told the truth to judges. Judges covertly showed thumbs up or down before asking questions, and subsequently made post‐probe judgments. Findings indicate that inmates use heuristic processing to a greater extent than non‐inmates, and that inmates, surprisingly, exhibit a probing effect, and not an opposite probing effect, when heuristic processing is employed to decide message veracity.

Visible speech improves human language understanding: implications for speech processing systems

Evidence from the study of human language understanding is presented suggesting that our ability to perceive visible speech can greatly influence our ability to understand and remember spoken language. A view of the speakers face can greatly aid in the perception of ambiguous or noisy speech and can aid cognitive processing of speech leading to better understanding and recall. Some of these effects have been replicated using computer synthesized visual and auditory speech. Thus, it appears that when giving an interface a voice, it may be best to give it a face too.

Lateralization of visuospatial attention across face regions varies with emotional prosody

It is well-established that linguistic processing is primarily a left-hemisphere activity, while emotional prosody processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere. Does attention, directed at different regions of the talkers face, reflect this pattern of lateralization? We investigated visuospatial attention across a talkers face with a dual-task paradigm, using dot detection and language comprehension measures. A static image of a talker was shown while participants listened to speeches spoken in two prosodic formats, emotional or neutral. A single dot was superimposed on the speakers face in one of 4 facial regions on half of the trials. Dot detection effects depended on emotion condition--in the neutral condition, discriminability was greater for the right-, than for the left-, side of the face image, and at the mouth, compared to the eye region. The opposite effects occurred in the emotional prosody condition. The results support a model wherein visuospatial attention used during language comprehension is directed by the left hemisphere given neutral emotional prosody, and by the right hemisphere given primarily negative emotional prosodic cues.

Does Visual Information Influence Infants' Movement to Music?.

Humans are often exposed to music beginning at birth (or even before birth), yet the study of the development of musical abilities during infancy has only recently gained momentum. The goals of the present study were to determine whether young infants (ages four to seven months) spontaneously moved rhythmically in the presence of music, and whether the presence of visual information in addition to music would increase or decrease infants’ movement. While nearly all infants moved in the presence of music, very few infants demonstrated rhythmic movement. Results revealed that when visual information was present, and particularly when infants appeared to show focused attention toward the visual information, infants moved less than when only auditory information was present. The latter result is in agreement with most studies of sensory dominance in adults in which visual stimuli are dominant over auditory stimuli.

Prenatal maternal cortisol measures predict learning and short-term memory performance in 3- but not 5-month-old infants

Little is known about relations between maternal prenatal stress and specific cognitive processes-learning and memory-in infants. A modified crib-mobile task was employed in a longitudinal design to test relations between maternal prenatal cortisol, prenatal subjective stress and anxiety, psychosocial variables, and learning and memory in 3- and 5-month-old infants. Results revealed that maternal prenatal cortisol was affected by particular psychosocial variables (e.g., maternal age, whether or not the infants grandmother provided childcare, financial status), but was unrelated to measures of maternal depression, anxiety, and stress. Although maternal prenatal cortisol was not predictive of learning or memory performance in 5-month-old infants, higher levels of basal maternal cortisol and reduced prenatal cortisol response was predictive of some learning and short-term memory measures in 3-month-old infants. These results suggest an influence of maternal neuroendocrine functioning on fetal neurological development, and the importance of separate examination of subjective and biological measures of stress.