Contemporary research in cognitive psychology reveals the impact of nonconscious mental structures and processes on the individual's conscious experience, thought, and action. Research on perceptual-cognitive and motoric skills indicates that they are automatized through experience, and thus rendered unconscious. In addition, research on subliminal perception, implicit memory, and hypnosis indicates that events can affect mental functions even though they cannot be consciously perceived or remembered. These findings suggest a tripartite division of the cognitive unconscious into truly unconscious mental processes operating on knowledge structures that may themselves be preconscious or subconscious.
This article examines the effects of memory loss on a patient's ability to remember the past and imagine the future. We present the case of D.B., who, as a result of hypoxic brain damage, suffered severe amnesia for the personally experienced past. By contrast, his knowledge of the nonpersonal past was relatively preserved. A similar pattern was evidenced in his ability to anticipate future events. Although D.B. had great difficulty imagining what his experiences might be like in the future, his capacity to anticipate issues and events in the public domain was comparable to that of neurologically healthy, age-matched controls. These findings suggest that neuropsychological dissociations between episodic and semantic memory for the past also may extend to the ability to anticipate the future.
Relating information to the self (self-referent encoding) has been shown to produce better recall than purely semantic encoding. This finding has been interpreted as demonstrating that self-reference produces a more elaborate memory trace than semantic encoding, and it has been cited frequently as evidence that the self is one of the most highly elaborated structures in memory. The experiments reported in this article challenge this interpretation of the self-reference effect by demonstrating that self-referent and semantic encodings produce virtually identical free recall levels if they are first equated for the amount of organization they encourage. On the basis of our findings we conclude the following: (a) Organization, not elaboration, is responsible for the superior recall performance obtained when information is encoded self-referentially, and (b) organization is not a necessary component of selfreferent encoding and can be orthogonally varied within self-referent and semantic encoding tasks. Finally, we discuss how a single-factor theory based on organization can account for many of the selfreferent recall findings reported in the literature. One of the most influential approaches to the study of human memory has been the Depth of Processing (DOP) framework proposed by Craik and Lockhart (1972). These investigators suggested that retention of a memory trace is determined by the nature of encoding operations carried out on stimulus material. Deep, meaningful analyses such as those prompted by semantic encoding tasks allow formation of a more durable trace than do shallow, structural analyses of the sound or appearance of stimuli. Until 1977, semantic encoding was commonly considered the optimal way of achieving good retention (e.g.
The authors present the case of W.J., who, as a result of a head injury, temporarily lost access to her episodic memory. W.J. was asked both during her amnesia and following its resolution to make trait judgments about herself. Because her responses when she could access episodic memories were consistent with her responses when she could not, the authors conclude that the loss of episodic memory did not greatly affect the availability of her trait self-knowledge. The authors discuss how neuropsychological evidence can contribute to theorizing about personality and social processes.
Previous research has shown that elderly adults have difficulty recalling the source of recently acquired facts but does not indicate whether source memory is more impaired than fact memory. This study examined old and young subjects' memory for novel facts that had been read to them by 1 of 2 experimental sources either in a random order or in a blocked order. When fact memory was equated in young and old at different levels of performance, the elderly exhibited disproportionate source memory deficits in the blocked condition but not in the random condition. Results suggest that the relation between fact and source memory in the elderly varies across experimental conditions.
The role of encoding conditions in producing hypermnesia (increased recall over successive trials) was examined by manipulating the availability of item-specific and relational information at encoding. Our findings demonstrate that encodings providing item-specific information (e.g., elaborative encodings) produce hypermnesia by facilitating the recovery of new items over trials, whereas encodings providing relational information (e.g., organizational encodings) produce hypermnesia by protecting against the loss of previously recalled items. Thus, the effects of encodings on hypermnesia may be understood by considering the type of trace information they make available.
Recent work has shown that unpredictable and/or uncontrollable events can produce a variety of cognitive, affective, and somatic disturbances to the organism. These disturbances are compared to and found to be quite similar to the symptoms of the classic cases of experimental neurosis described by Pavlov, Gantt, Liddell, Masserman, and Wolpe. The hypothesis is then developed that the common thread running through the entire experimental neurosis literature is that in each case important life events become unpredictable or uncontrollable, or both. This interpretation is contrasted with the earlier physiological, psychodynamic, and behavioral interpretations made by the investigators themselves. The implications of this analysis of experimental neurosis for various issues in the predictability-controllability literature are discussed-for example, the interaction between unpredictability and uncontrollability, the "threshold" for response to lack of predictability or controllability, and the lack versus the loss of predictability and controllability. Finally, the possible clinical relevance of this new perspective on experimental neurosis is discussed.In 1927 I. P. Pavlov reported an experiment by Shenger-Krestovnikova in which a hungry dog was placed in a harness for what was intended to be a straightforward salivary conditioning experiment. When a circle was presented, meat powder was forthcoming;Editor's Note. This manuscript was received prior to publication of the special issue on learned helplessness (Vol. 87, No. 1). Therefore, the articles in the special issue were not available as references to Mineka and Kihlstrom. Nevertheless, many of them are relevant to the issues discussed in this article and should be consulted by the interested reader.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.