We examined the importance of autobiographical significance (AS) in the representation and organization of semantic memory by examining which famous people are most likely to be associated with specific personal memories and whether or not this AS can be distinguished from other factors, such as familiarity. Norming studies with 45- to 55-year-old and 65- to 80-year-old participants suggested t...

Metonymic location names refer to other, related entities and possess a meaning different from the literal, geographic sense. Metonymic names are to be treated differently to improve performance of geographic information retrieval (GIR). This paper presents a method for disambiguating location names in textual information to distinguish literal and metonymic senses, based on shallow features. T...

The ability to put a name to a face is a vital aspect of human interaction, but many people find this extremely difficult, especially after being introduced to someone for the first time. Creating enduring associations between arbitrary stimuli in this manner is also a prime example of what patients with amnesia find most difficult. To help develop a better understanding of this type of memory,...

Five experiments examine the proposal that object names are closely linked to representations of global, 3D shape by comparing memory for simple line drawings of structurally possible and impossible novel objects. Objects were rendered impossible through local edge violations to global coherence (cf. Schacter, Cooper, & Delaney, 1990) and supplementary observations confirmed that the sets of po...

The effects of a memory load on syntactic processing by younger and older adults were examined. Participants were asked to remember a noun phrase (NP) memory load while they read sentences varying in syntactic complexity. Two types of NPs were used as memory loads: proper names or definite descriptions referring to occupations or roles. The NPs used in the sentence and memory load either matche...

Functional neuroimaging and neuropsychological findings suggest that memory retrieval of common and proper names is subserved by different neuro-functional systems but little is known about the topographic localization of neural generators. In the present study brain electrical activity was recorded with a high density electrode montage in healthy young volunteers during lexical retrieval upon ...

Confusing medication names and packaging may cause or contribute to potentially harmful medication errors. The names of several chemotherapy and supportive agents can look or sound like the names of other chemotherapy agents or unrelated medications and can be inadvertently interchanged, or mixed up. Poor handwriting, abbreviations of medication names, unclear verbal medication orders, memory l...

Building on previous studies of the effects of similarity on recognition memory for faces (e.g., Busey & Tunnicliff, 1999; Yotsumoto, Kahana, Wilson, & Sekuler, in press), we examined similarity’s role in the learning of novel face-name associations. In Experiment 1, subjects learned the names of synthetic faces that varied along four perceptual dimensions (Wilson, Loffler, & Wilkinson, 2002). ...

The original liveness based flow and context sensitive points-to analysis (LFCPA) is restricted to scalar pointer variables and scalar pointees on stack and static memory. In this paper, we extend it to support heap memory and pointer expressions involving structures, unions, arrays, and pointer arithmetic. The key idea behind these extensions involves constructing bounded names for locations i...