Some studies with children have shown that there is no semantic priming at short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) in lexical decision and naming tasks for homographs. The predictions of spreading activation theories might explain this missing effect. There may be differences in children's and adults' memory structures. We have explored this hypothesis. The development of memory structure represe...

Three experiments explored the extent to which patterns of abnormal comprehension in Broca’s aphasia can be attributed to a disruption of information encoded in the selectional restrictions of verbs. An auditory lexical decision paradigm was used to examine sensitivity to selectional restriction relations between verbs and their noun arguments as well as to associative semantic relations. Exper...

Statistical learning (SL) research aims to clarify the potential role that associative-based learning mechanisms may play in language. Understanding learners’ processing of nonadjacent statistical structure is vital to this enterprise, since language requires the rapid tracking and integration of long-distance dependencies. This paper builds upon existing nonadjacent SL work by introducing a no...

The formation of associations between items and their context has been proposed to rely on mechanisms distinct from those supporting memory for a single item. Although emotional experiences can profoundly affect memory, our understanding of how it interacts with different aspects of memory remains unclear. We performed three experiments to examine the effects of emotion on memory for items and ...

With the exception of honeybees, there have been few good invertebrate models for associative learning. Grasshoppers and locusts (Orthoptera: Acrididae) possess a number of characteristics that make them excellent candidates for such studies, and in this paper we present a novel protocol, based on a Y-maze, that is specifically designed for studying their learning and choice behaviour. Three se...

In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that medial temporal lobe (MTL) amnesic patients and, likewise, diencephalic (DNC) amnesic patients evidence a disproportionate deficit in memory for associations in comparison with memory for single items. In Experiment 1, we equated item recognition in amnesic and control participants and found that, under these conditions, associative recognition ...

Studies recording hippocampal neural activity show widespread registration of events during associative learning. Recent computational models of hippocampal function have stressed its role in attentional processes specified by well-developed modern theories of associative learning. These modeling efforts are largely aimed at accounting for the behavioral outcomes of damage to the hippocampal sy...

a sigmoid function is necessary for creation a chaotic neural network (cnn). in this paper, a new function for cnn is proposed that it can increase the speed of convergence. in the proposed method, we use a novel signal for controlling chaos. both the theory analysis and computer simulation results show that the performance of cnn can be improved remarkably by using our method. by means of this...

In humans recognition memory deficits, a typical feature of diencephalic amnesia, have been tentatively linked to mediodorsal thalamic nucleus (MD) damage. Animal studies have occasionally investigated the role of the MD in single-item recognition, but have not systematically analyzed its involvement in other recognition memory processes. In Experiment 1 rats with bilateral excitotoxic lesions ...