THE NEW Royal Commission on long-term care is about to start hearing evidence and is expected to deliver its verdict in a year's time. After this there is likely to be considerable public and political pressure for government action, for feelings continue to run high about why some care is free and some must be paid for, and about the variations across the country in the types and quality of lo...

Information is represented in long-term memory as a network of associations among concepts. Information is retrieved by spreading activation from concepts in working memory through the network structure. The time required to retrieve information is a function of the level of activation that it achieves. Fanning of multiple paths from a node dissipates the activation the node sends down any path...

Most long-term memories are formed as a consequence of multiple experiences. The temporal spacing of these experiences is of considerable importance: experiences distributed over time (spaced training) are more easily encoded and remembered than either closely spaced experiences, or a single prolonged experience (massed training). In this article, we first review findings from studies in animal...

A behavioral analog of the synaptic tagging and capture process, a key property of synaptic plasticity, has been predicted recently. Here, we demonstrate that weak inhibitory avoidance training, which induces short- but not long-term memory (LTM), can be consolidated into LTM by an exploration to a novel, but not a familiar, environment occurring close in time to the training session. This memo...