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We view these results as an indication that virtual environments could provide helpful standard tools for assessing age effects on the main aspects of episodic memory.

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Few studies have investigated the link between episodic memory and presence: the feeling of "being there" and reacting to a stimulus as if it were real. We collected data from 244 participants after they had watched the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron. They answered questions about factual (details of the movie) and temporal memory (order of the scenes) about the movie, as well as their emotion experience and their sense of presence during the projection. Both higher emotion experience and sense of presence were related to better factual memory, but not to temporal order memory. Crucially, the link between emotion and factual memory was mediated by the sense of presence. We interpreted the role of presence as an external absorption of the attentional focus toward the stimulus, thus enhancing memory encoding. Our findings could shed light on the cognitive processes underlying memory impairments in psychiatric conditions characterized by an altered sense of reality.

Two experiments examined age-related differences in memory for bizarre and common pictures. In Experiment 1, a facilitative effect of bizarreness was obtained for young adults and one of the older groups, but not for the oldest group (over age 70). However, the bizarreness effect was found for even the oldest group when predominantly common lists were used in Experiment 2. It is concluded that older adults suffer from deficits in distinctive processing, but those deficits can be reduced by providing a more uniformly common context in which differences can be processed.

This paper examines the first moments of the emergence of “psychometrics” as a discipline, using a history of the Binet–Simon test (precursor to the Stanford–Binet) to engage the question of how intelligence became a “psychological object.” To begin to answer this, we used a previously-unexamined set of French texts to highlight the negotiations and collaborations that led Alfred Binet (1857–1911) to identify “mental testing” as a research area worth pursuing. This included a long-standing rivalry with Désiré-Magloire Bourneville (1840–1909), who argued for decades that psychiatrists ought to be the professional arbiters of which children would be removed from the standard curriculum and referred to special education classes in asylums. In contrast, Binet sought to keep children in schools and conceived of a way for psychologists to do this. Supported by the Société libre de l'étude psychologique de l'enfant [Free society for the psychological study of the child], and by a number of collaborators and friends, he thus undertook to create a “metric” scale of intelligence—and the associated testing apparatus—to legitimize the role of psychologists in a to-that-point psychiatric domain: identifying and treating “the abnormal”. The result was a change in the earlier law requiring all healthy French children to attend school, between the ages of 6 and 13, to recognize instead that otherwise normal children sometimes need special help: they are “slow” (arriéré), but not “sick.” This conceptualization of intelligence was then carried forward, through the test's influence on Lewis Terman (1877–1956) and Lightner Witmer (1867–1956), to shape virtually all subsequent thinking about intelligence testing and its role in society

Differences related to ageing were investigated in two cases of secondary-distinctiveness-based effects: the bizarreness effect and the orthographic distinctiveness effect. A secondary distinctiveness effect means that items that are unusual compared to one's general knowledge stored in permanent memory are better remembered than common items. Experiment 1 confirmed that ageing diminishes the facilitative effects of bizarreness in a mixed list design with equal numbers of bizarre and common images. We suggest that the impaired bizarreness effect in older adults (above age 70) may be due to reduced attentional resources, since no bizarreness effect was observed for younger adults in the divided attention condition. Experiment 2 studied the orthographic distinctiveness effect in ageing for the first time. Contrary to our expectations, an orthographic distinctiveness effect was observed for all participants including older adults and younger adults in a divided attention condition. Because reduced attentional resources due to normal ageing or to experimental manipulation did not impact the facilitative effects of orthographic distinctiveness, our findings suggest that the orthographic distinctiveness effect may be mediated by more automatic processing.

Pratique des Hautes EtudesTheodule Ribot taught philosophy before obtaining 2 doctoral degrees from the Sorbonne in 1873: 1 about David Hartley and 1 about hereditary factors in psychology. Ribot wrote books on the topics of 19th-century British psychology (1870), 19th-century German psychology (1879), diseases of memory (1881), diseases of will (1883b), and diseases of personality (1885), among others. He founded the Revue Philosophique (Ribot, 1876b), had a chair created for him at the College de France (in 1888), helped organize the first French laboratory of experimental psychology (in 1889), and presided over the First International Congress of Psychology in Paris in 1889 (Ribot, 1889b).It is astonishing that nobody has yet written a detailed biography of Theodule Ribot. In this connection, the remark made by Boring (1950) is still relevant: "The accounts of him are short and inadequate as they are for many who died during the first World War" (p. 438). Even the most extensive works written in French are notably incomplete and are more concerned with listing his works than with providing a trustworthy account of his life (Dugas, 1924; Lamarque, 1928). Given that historians of psychology are in general agreement that Ribot was the founder of French "scientific" psychology, it seemed to us not only interesting, but obligatory, to provide, for the benefit of historians and psychologists alike, an extensive biography of this French pioneer. He had an influence both on the substantive content of psychology, by way of laws that bear his name, and on the institutional development of the discipline, by founding a journal and a chair in psychology; he also helped to found a laboratory. Some aspects of his research on the organic basis of memory have recently been explored in detail by historians of science (Gasser, 1988;Nicolas, 1997). This article is intended to serve as an introduction to a full-length biography, currently being written.However, this is a preliminary sketch because there are various lacunae in our knowledge concerning Ribot's life. Although it is true that we can be fairly precise about the most important events in his career, documents concerning the beginning and end of his life are irritatingly few in number (the fact that Ribot left no