BACKGROUND Admission to a nursing home is generally regarded as a stressful time for older people and their carers. Although the choice of home is significant in facilitating a more positive transition, few studies have explored this issue in detail, particularly in the context of rural communities. With a worldwide ageing population and an increasing demand for long-term care facilities, it is...

One's own name seems to have a special status in the processing of incoming information. In event-related potential (ERP) studies this preferential status has mainly been associated with higher P300 to one's own name than to other names. Some studies showed preferential responses to own name even for earlier ERP components. However, instead of just being self-specific, these effects could be re...

Previous studies on the effects of emotional context on memory for centrally presented neutral items have obtained inconsistent results. And in most of those studies subjects were asked to either make a connection between the item and the context at study or retrieve both the item and the context. When no response for the contexts is required, how emotional contexts influence memory for neutral...

The ability to recognize an individual from their voice is a widespread ability with a long evolutionary history. Yet, the perceptual representation of familiar voices is ill-defined. In two experiments, we explored the neuropsychological processes involved in the perception of voice identity. We specifically explored the hypothesis that familiar voices (trained-to-familiar (Experiment 1), and ...

This article reports 2 experiments in which nonfamous faces were paired with famous (e.g., Oprah Winfrey) or semifamous (e.g., Annika Sorenstam) faces during an initial orienting task. In Experiment 1, the orienting task directed participants to consider the relationship between the paired faces. In Experiment 2, participants considered distinctive qualities of the paired faces. Participants th...

When humans and animals interact with one another over an extended time span they familiarise and may develop a relationship, which can exert an influence on both partners. For example, the behaviour of an animal in experiments may be affected by its relationship to the human experimenter. However, few studies have systematically examined the impact of human-animal relationships on experimental...

Musicology students are engaged with music on an academic level and usually have an extensive musical background. They have a considerable knowledge of music history and theory and listening to music may be regarded as one of their primary occupations. Taken together, these factors qualify them as ≫expert listeners≪, who may be expected to exhibit a specific profile of musical taste: interest i...

Psychological and aesthetic theories predict that music is appreciated at optimal, peak levels of familiarity and complexity, and that appreciation of music exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with familiarity as well as complexity. Because increased familiarity conceivably leads to improved processing and less perceived complexity, we test whether there is an interaction between familia...

People often falsely recognize nonstudied lures that are semantically similar to previously studied words. Behavioral research suggests that such false recognition is based on high semantic overlap between studied items and lures that yield a feeling of familiarity, whereas true recognition is more often associated with the recollection of details. Despite this behavioral evidence for differenc...

Metacognitive monitoring and control are two interdependent mechanisms by which people regulate encoding and retrieval processes in memory. While much is known about monitoring, and how the results of monitoring processes affect control at encoding, much less evidence is available for the monitoring–control relationship with respect to the regulation of retrieval. The present study provides inf...