The ability to bring to mind a past experience depends on the cognitive and neural processes that are engaged during the experience and that support memory formation. A central and much debated question is whether the processes that underlie rote verbal rehearsal-that is, working memory mechanisms that keep information in mind-impact memory formation and subsequent remembering. The present stud...

OBJECTIVE The ability to imagine an elaborative event from a personal perspective relies on several cognitive processes that may potentially enhance subsequent memory for the event, including visual imagery, semantic elaboration, emotional processing, and self-referential processing. In an effort to find a novel strategy for enhancing memory in memory-impaired individuals with neurological dama...

Behavioral research consistently shows that congruous events, that is, events whose constituent elements match along some specific dimension, are better remembered than incongruous events. Although it has been speculated that this "congruency subsequent memory effect" (cSME) results from enhanced semantic elaboration, empirical evidence for this account is lacking. Here, we report a set of beha...

This study introduces the concept of “attitude strength” to explain why some IT users’ attitudes are not strongly related to their usage behaviors. We review the attitude strength literature, employ the elaboration likelihood model to theorize personal relevance and related expertise as two salient dimensions of attitude strength in the IT usage context, and postulate a research model to captur...

One of the limiting factors for the Semantic Web to be exploited into nowadays web applications is the great complexity associated to semantic elaboration which almost always includes logical reasoning, natural language processing, manipulation of different kinds of data, etc. The availability of easy to use APIs and platforms can enable the integration of semantics on the current web by hiding...

PURPOSE To evaluate classification accuracy and clinical feasibility of a narrative analysis tool for identifying children with a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). METHOD Picture-elicited narratives generated by 16 age-matched pairs of school-aged children (FASD vs. typical development [TD]) were coded for semantic elaboration and reference strategy by judges who were unaware of age, ge...

The aim of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that semantic information facilitates auditory and visual spatial learning and memory. An auditory spatial task was administered, whereby healthy participants were placed in the center of a semi-circle that contained an array of speakers where the locations of nameable and non-nameable sounds were learned. In the visual spatial task, locat...

Jennifer Kirstin Benz: A Framework for Understanding the Role of Self-Interest in Attitude Formation (Under the direction of Thomas Carsey) In this paper I present a framework based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion to explain the interplay of self-interest with symbolic beliefs and sociotropic perceptions in determining policy preferences. In developing the self-interest framew...