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Exposure to some music, in particular classical music, has been reported to produce transient increases in cognitive performance. The authors investigated the effect of listening to an excerpt of Vivaldi's Four Seasons on category fluency in healthy older adult controls and Alzheimer's disease patients. In a counterbalanced repeated-measure design, participants completed two, 1-min category fluency tasks whilst listening to an excerpt of Vivaldi and two, 1-min category fluency tasks without music. The authors report a positive effect of music on category fluency, with performance in the music condition exceeding performance without music in both the healthy older adult control participants and the Alzheimer's disease patients. In keeping with previous reports, the authors conclude that music enhances attentional processes, and that this can be demonstrated in Alzheimer's disease.

Is metacognition a general resource shared across domains? Previous research has documented consistent biases in judgments across tasks. In contrast, there is debate regarding the domain generality or the domain specificity of the ability to discriminate between correct and incorrect answers (metacognitive sensitivity) because most previous work has documented nonsignificant correlations across domains. However, such null findings may be due to low statistical power and differences in task structure or performance, thereby masking a latent domain generality in metacognition. We examined across-domain correlations in confidence level and sensitivity in a large sample ( N = 181). Participants performed 4 2-alternative forced-choice tasks (episodic memory, semantic memory, executive function, and visual perception) with trial-by-trial confidence judgments. We found significant correlations in average confidence level across tasks. By applying a hierarchical Bayesian model to estimate cross-task covariance, we found five out 6 cross-task correlations in metacognitive efficiency (meta- d ′/ d ′) were significant, even for pairs of tasks in which first-order performance was not correlated. This suggests that at least some components of metacognitive efficiency in retrospective confidence are domain general.

Five experiments examined whether retrieval-induced-forgetting effects are observed for implicit tests of memory. In each experiment participants first studied category-exemplar paired associates, then practiced retrieval for a subset of items from a subset of categories before finally completing memory tests for all the studied items. In standard fashion, inhibition was measured as the performance difference of unpracticed items from practiced categories and unpracticed items from unpracticed categories. Across the 5 experiments poorer performance for unpracticed items was seen in conceptual implicit memory (category generation and category matching) but not in perceptual implicit memory (stem completion, perceptual identification). Thus, retrieval-induced-forgetting effects are limited to tests of conceptual memory.

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A case of retrograde amnesia, PJM, elucidated the relationship between self, episodic memory and autobiographical knowledge. Results from a variety of measures including the I Am Memory Task (IAM Task), where memories are cued by self-generated self concepts, demonstrate that PJM has a coherent, continuous sense of self, despite having lost episodic memories for an 18-month period. Her use of conceptual autobiographical knowledge, in episodic tasks and to support aspects of identity, shows how autobiographical knowledge can support the self when episodic memories are inaccessible. These results are discussed with relation to current neuropsychological models of self and memory.