Older adults suffer from many cognitive impairments relative to young adults and one of the most established types of age-related cognitive decline is a reduction in memory performance. Memory for single units of information (item memory) have been shown to be less susceptible to cognitive ageing than memory for associations among units of information (associative memory). An associative defici...

It is well known that schizophrenics have difficulty in effectively encoding verbal materials into their long-term memories and consequently show a deficit in recall. Recently, orienting tasks were introduced as a method for achieving equivalent to normal encoding and mnemonic organization in schizophrenics; consequently, their deficit in recall disappeared. A detailed review of the literature,...

This paper is divided into three sections. The first reviews the evidence for a verbal short-term memory deficit in Down syndrome. Existing research suggests that short-term memory for verbal information tends to be impaired in Down syndrome, in contrast to short-term memory for visual and spatial material. In addition, problems of hearing or speech do not appear to be a major cause of difficul...

The contribution of the thalamus to the functioning of prospective memory (PM) is currently unknown. Here we report an experimental investigation of the performance of two patients with bilateral infarcts in the anterior-mesial regions of the thalami on an event-based PM paradigm. One patient, G.P., had a pervasive declarative memory impairment but no significant executive deficit. The other pa...

Here we review our development of an animal model of episodic memory and amnesia that employs a signal detection analyses to characterize recognition memory performance in rats. This approach aims to distinguish episodic recollection of studied items from mere familiarity for recently experienced stimuli, and then to examine the neural basis of these memory processes. Our findings on intact ani...

We have developed a method for temporal and regional gene expression targeting (TARGET) in Drosophila and show the simultaneous spatial and temporal rescue of a memory defect. The transient expression of the rutabaga-encoded adenylyl cyclase in the mushroom bodies of the adult brain was necessary and sufficient to rescue the rutabaga memory deficit, which rules out a developmental brain defect ...

We examined memory for pitch in congenital amusia in two tasks. In one task, we varied the pitch distance between the target and comparison tone from 4 to 9 semitones and inserted either a silence or 6 interpolated tones between the tones to be compared. In a second task, we manipulated the number of pitches to be retained in sequences of length 1, 3, or 5. Amusics’ sensitivity to pitch distanc...

Impairments in working memory are suggested to be one of the defining characteristics of dyslexia and deficits in verbal recall are well documented. However, the situation regarding visuospatial memory is less clear. In a widely used measure, the Corsi blocks task, sequences of visuospatial locations can be recalled forwards, in the order presented (CF) or backwards, in reverse order (CB). Prev...

Episodic memory loss is a defining feature of early-stage Alzheimer's disease (AD). A test of episodic-like memory for the rat, the What-Where-Which occasion task (WWWhich), requires the association of object, location, and contextual information to form an integrated memory for an event. The WWWhich task cannot be solved by use of non-episodic information such as object familiarity and is depe...