Our everyday surroundings besiege us with information. The battle is for a share of our limited attention and memory, with the brain selecting the winners and discarding the losers. Previous research shows that both bottom-up and top-down factors bias competition in favor of high priority stimuli. We propose that arousal during an event increases this bias both in perception and in long-term me...

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...