Matthew D. Schulkind

Distribution of Important and Word-Cued Autobiographical Memories in 20-, 35-, and 70-Year-Old Adults

For word-cued autobiographical memories, older adults had an increase, or bump, from the ages 10 to 30. All age groups had fewer memories from childhood than from other years and a power-function retention for memories from the most recent 10 years. There were no consistent differences in reaction times and rating scale responses across decades. Concrete words cued older memories, but no property of the cues predicted which memories would come from the bump. The 5 most important memories given by 20- and 35-year-old participants were distributed similarly to their word-cued memories, but those given by 70-year-old participants came mostly from the single 20-to-30 decade. No theory fully accounts for the bump.

The distribution of autobiographical memories across the lifespan

Words were used to cue autobiographical memories from 20- and 70-year-old subjects. Both groups showed a decrease in memories from the childhood years and a power-function retention function for their most recent 10 years. Older subjects also had an increase in the number of memories from the ages 10 to 30. These results held for individual subjects as well as grouped data and held when either 124 or 921 memories were cued. Reaction times to produce memories were constant across decades except for childhood where they were longer.

Parallel memory retrieval in dual-task situations : I. Semantic memory

Can participants retrieve information about the 2nd of 2 stimuli while they are processing the 1st? Four experiments suggest they can. Reaction times to the 1st stimulus were faster if it came from the same category as the 2nd than if it came from a different category. This category-match effect was observed for letter-digit discrimination (Experiment 1), magnitude and parity judgments about digits (Experiment 2), and lexical decisions (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 showed that the 2nd stimulus could semantically prime the 1st. The category-match effect was observed only when the same task was performed on the 2 stimuli. When the task changed from the 1st stimulus to the 2nd, there was no advantage of a category match. This dependence on task set may explain previous failures to find parallel retrieval.

Music, emotion, and autobiographical memory: they're playing your song.

Very long-term memory for popular music was investigated. Older and younger adults listened to 20-sec excerpts of popular songs drawn from across the 20th century. The subjects gave emotionality and preference ratings and tried to name the title, artist, and year of popularity for each excerpt. They also performed a cued memory test for the lyrics. The older adults’ emotionality ratings were highest for songs from their youth; they remembered more about these songs, as well. However, the stimuli failed to cue many autobiographical memories of specific events. Further analyses revealed that the older adults were less likely than the younger adults to retrieve multiple attributes of a song together (i.e., title and artist) and that there was a significant positive correlation between emotion and memory, especially for the older adults. These results have implications for research on long-term memory, as well as on the relationship between emotion and memory.

A Study of Gender Differences in Autobiographical Memory: Broken Down by Age and Sex

Data from 40 older adults who produced autobiographical memories to word cues and to the request to list five important memories, and data from 60 older adults who answered factual multiple-choice questions for events spread across their lives, were analyzed for gender differences. In spite of considerable statistical power, there were no gender differences in the distribution of autobiographical memories over the lifespan, in the distribution of important memories, in various ratings provided to these memories, or in the distribution of knowledge for events. The only gender difference found was that men performed better on factual questions about current events and baseball. Thus, counter to what might be expected from Darwinian theory and some behavioral data, gender differences were minimal.

Emotional organization of autobiographical memory

The emotional organization of autobiographical memory was examined by determining whether emotional cues would influence autobiographical retrieval in younger and older adults. Unfamiliar musical cues that represented orthogonal combinations of positive and negative valence and high and low arousal were used. Whereas cue valence influenced the valence of the retrieved memories, cue arousal did not affect arousal ratings. However, high-arousal cues were associated with reduced response latencies. A significant bias to report positive memories was observed, especially for the older adults, but neither the distribution of memories across the life span nor response latencies varied across memories differing in valence or arousal. These data indicate that emotional information can serve as effective cues for autobiographical memories and that autobiographical memories are organized in terms of emotional valence but not emotional arousal. Thus, current theories of autobiographical memory must be expanded to include emotional valence as a primary dimension of organization.

PROPERTIES OF WORD CUES FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

A sample of 124 words were used to cue autobiographical memories in 120 adults varying in age from 20 to 73 years. Individual words reliably cued autobiographical memories of different ages with different speeds. For all age groups, words rated high in imagery produced older memories and faster reaction times.

Is Memory for Music Special

Although psychologists since Hermann Ebbinghaus have studied memory, research in this area has focused on visual and verbal stimuli with little attention paid to music. This bias is surprising because of the ubiquity of music in human cultures across history as well as current cultural beliefs that memory for music is “special.” This paper examines the question of whether memory for music is special by addressing two related questions: First, do cultural beliefs about the mnemonic power of music stand up to empirical test? Second, can theories designed to explain memory for non‐musical stimuli be applied to musical stimuli? A review of the literature suggests that music is special in some circumstances but not others and that some theories designed to explain cognitive processing of linguistic stimuli apply reasonably well to musical stimuli. Thus, although the question of whether memory for music is special remains open, the unique structure of musical stimuli strongly suggests that memory for music is indeed special.

Long-term memory for temporal structure:

In three experiments, long-term memory for temporal structure was examined by having participants identify both well-known (e.g., “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”) and novel songs. The target songs were subjected to a number of rhythmic alterations, to assess the importance of four critical features of identification performance. The four critical features were meter, phrasing, rhythmic contour (ordinal scaling of note durations), and the ratio of successive durations. In contrast with previous work, the unaltered version of each song was identified significantly better than any altered version. This indicates that rhythm is stored in long-term memory. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that all four critical features play a role in the identification of songs. These results held for both well-known and novel tunes.

Serial Processing in Melody Identification and the Organization of Musical Semantic Memory

Unlike the visual stimuli used in most object identification experiments, melodies are organized temporally rather than spatially. Therefore, they may be particularly sensitive to manipulations of the order in which information is revealed. Two experiments examined whether the initial elements of a melody are differentially important for identification. Initial exposures to impoverished versions of a melody significantly decreased subsequent identification, especially when the early exposures did not include the initial notes of the melody. Analyses of the initial notes indicated that they are differentially important for melody identification because they help the listener detect the overall structure of the melody. Confusion errors tended to be songs that either were drawn from the same genre or shared similar phrasing. These data indicate that conceptual processing influences melody identification, that phrase-level information is used to organize melodies in semantic memory, and that phrase-level information is required to effectively search semantic memory.