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Retrieval practice is a straightforward and effective way to improve student learning, and its efficacy has been demonstrated repeatedly in the laboratory and in the classroom. In the current study, we implemented retrieval practice in the form of daily reviews in the classroom. Students (N = 47) in a cognitive psychology course completed a daily review at the beginning of each class. These consisted of 2-4 questions that encouraged students to practice retrieving material covered in lectures from the previous week. Then at the end of the semester, students took a comprehensive final exam consisting of content that was either on a daily review, a unit exam, both or neither. We replicated previous work showing that retrieval practice improved memory. Specifically, we found that students performed significantly better on questions whose information had been covered on both a daily review and unit exam. However, student performance did not differ amongst items covered only on a daily review, a unit exam, or on neither. Additionally, we extended previous work and found that students were significantly less overconfident for information covered on both a daily review and unit exam. The current results indicate that retrieval practice helps college students remember material over the course of a semester and also improves their ability to evaluate their own knowledge of the material.

We segment what we read into meaningful events, each separated by a discrete boundary. How does event segmentation during encoding relate to the structure of story information in long-term memory? To evaluate this question, participants read stories of fictional historical events and then engaged in a postreading verb arrangement task. In this task, participants saw verbs from each of the events placed randomly on a computer screen and then arranged the verbs into groups onscreen based on their understanding of the story. Participants who successfully comprehended the story placed verbs from the same event closer to each other than verbs from different events, even after controlling for orthographic, text-based, semantic, and situational overlap between verbs. Thus, how people structure story information into separate events during online comprehension is associated with how that information is stored in memory. Specifically, story information within an event is bound together in memory more so than information between events.

People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often report difficulty remembering information in their everyday lives. Recent findings suggest that such difficulties may be due to PTSD-related deficits in parsing ongoing activity into discrete events, a process called "event segmentation." Here, we investigated the causal relationship between event segmentation and memory by cueing event boundaries and evaluating its effect on subsequent memory in people with PTSD. People with PTSD (n = 38) and trauma-matched controls (n = 36) watched and remembered videos of everyday activities that were either unedited, contained visual and auditory cues at event boundaries, or contained visual and auditory cues at event middles. PTSD symptom severity varied substantial within both the group with a PTSD diagnosis and the control group. Memory performance did not differ significantly between groups, but people with high symptoms of PTSD remembered fewer details from the videos than those with lower symptoms of PTSD. Both those with PTSD and controls remembered more information from the videos in the event boundary cue condition than the middle cue or unedited conditions. This finding has important implications for translational work focusing on addressing everyday memory complaints in people with PTSD.

Current theories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) propose that memory abnormalities are central to the development and persistence of symptoms. While the most notable memory disturbances in PTSD involve memory for the trauma itself, individuals often have trouble remembering aspects of everyday life. Further, people with PTSD may have difficulty segmenting ongoing activity into discrete units, which is important for our perception and later memory of the activity. The current study investigated whether PTSD diagnosis and symptom severity predicted event segmentation and memory for everyday activities. To do so, 63 people with PTSD and 64 controls with a trauma history watched, segmented, and recalled videos of everyday activities. Viewers with higher PTSD symptom severity showed lower agreement on locations of event boundaries and recalled fewer fine-grained actions than did those with lower symptom severity. These results suggest that PTSD symptoms alter event segmentation, which may contribute to subsequent memory disturbances.

How does viewers' knowledge guide their attention while they watch everyday events, how does it affect their memory, and does it change with age? Older adults have diminished episodic memory for everyday events, but intact semantic knowledge. Indeed, research suggests that older adults may rely on their semantic memory to offset impairments in episodic memory, and when relevant knowledge is lacking, older adults' memory can suffer. Yet, the mechanism by which prior knowledge guides attentional selection when watching dynamic activity is unclear. To address this, we studied the influence of knowledge on attention and memory for everyday events in young and older adults by tracking their eyes while they watched videos. The videos depicted activities that older adults perform more frequently than young adults (balancing a checkbook, planting flowers) or activities that young adults perform more frequently than older adults (installing a printer, setting up a video game). Participants completed free recall, recognition, and order memory tests after each video. We found age-related memory deficits when older adults had little knowledge of the activities, but memory did not differ between age groups when older adults had relevant knowledge and experience with the activities. Critically, results showed that knowledge influenced where viewers fixated when watching the videos. Older adults fixated less goal-relevant information compared to young adults when watching young adult activities, but they fixated goal-relevant information similarly to young adults, when watching more older adult activities. Finally, results showed that fixating goal-relevant information predicted free recall of the everyday activities for both age groups. Thus, older adults may use relevant knowledge to more effectively infer the goals of actors, which guides their attention to goal-relevant actions, thus improving their episodic memory for everyday activities.

Congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) is among the most common congenital infections globally. Of 85%–90% cCMV‐infected infants without symptoms at birth, 10%–15% develop sequelae, most commonly sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL); their childhood neurodevelopmental outcomes are less well understood. Embase and MEDLINE were searched for publications from 16th September 2016 to 9th February 2024 to identify studies reporting primary data on neurodevelopmental outcomes in children with asymptomatic cCMV (AcCMV), measured using assessment tools or as evaluated by the study investigators, clinicians, educators, or parents. The Newcastle‐Ottawa scale was applied to studies to assess risk of bias. Of 28 studies from 18 mostly high‐income countries, there were 5‐109 children with AcCMV per study and 6/28 had a mean or median age at last follow‐up of ≥5 years. Children with AcCMV had better neurodevelopmental outcomes than children with symptomatic cCMV in 16/19 studies. Of 9/28 studies comparing AcCMV with CMV‐uninfected children, six reported similar outcomes whilst three reported differences limited to measures of full‐scale intelligence and receptive vocabulary among children with AcCMV and SNHL, or more generally in motor impairment. Common limitations of studies for our question were a lack of cCMV‐uninfected controls, heterogeneous definitions of AcCMV, lack of focus on neurodevelopment, selection bias and inadequate follow‐up. There was little evidence of children with AcCMV having worse neurodevelopmental outcomes than CMV‐uninfected children, but this conclusion is limited by study characteristics and quality; findings highlight the need for well‐designed and standardised approaches to investigate long‐term sequelae. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent introductions of chikungunya virus (CHIKV) and Zika virus (ZIKV) in the Americas led to widespread epidemics with substantial health and economic effects. Small island developing states in the [...]

Declines in episodic memory accompany both healthy aging and age-related diseases, such as dementia. Given that memory complaints are common in the aging population, a wealth of research has evaluated the underlying mechanisms of these declines and explored strategy interventions that could offset them. In the current paper, we describe a newer approach to improving memory: event segmentation training. Event segmentation is an encoding strategy in which individuals parse continuous activity into meaningful chunks. The ability to segment activity is associated with later memory for the events, but unfortunately, this segmentation ability declines with age. Importantly, interventions designed to improve event segmentation have resulted in memory improvements for both young and older adults. We will review these past experiments as well as some new event segmentation training work that uses older adults’ semantic knowledge to improve their segmentation and episodic memory. We believe that future research on event segmentation is a promising avenue for improving older adults’ ability to remember everyday activities.

When people observe everyday activity, they spontaneously parse it into discrete meaningful events. Individuals who segment activity in a more normative fashion show better subsequent memory for the events. If segmenting events effectively leads to better memory, does asking people to attend to segmentation improve subsequent memory? To answer this question, participants viewed movies of naturalistic activity with instructions to remember the activity for a later test, and in some conditions additionally pressed a button to segment the movies into meaningful events or performed a control condition that required button-pressing but not attending to segmentation. In 5 experiments, memory for the movies was assessed at intervals ranging from immediately following viewing to 1 month later. Performing the event segmentation task led to superior memory at delays ranging from 10 min to 1 month. Further, individual differences in segmentation ability predicted individual differences in memory performance for up to a month following encoding. This study provides the first evidence that manipulating event segmentation affects memory over long delays and that individual differences in event segmentation are related to differences in memory over long delays. These effects suggest that attending to how an activity breaks down into meaningful events contributes to memory formation. Instructing people to more effectively segment events may serve as a potential intervention to alleviate everyday memory complaints in aging and clinical populations.