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Hong Kong adopted the practice of assessing social value of heritage sites in the late 1990s or early 2000s, which by then had been widely incorporated by other places around the world, in line with the Burra Charter of 1979. However, social value appraisals in Hong Kong continue to be inadequate, due in part to a lack of understanding of this complex notion and how it works. Similar challenges have also been observed in other places, as attested in existing literature. This article reviews the rich literature on place and place-related concepts, and how these are operationalized by various authors to achieve their research objectives. Adopting a phenomenological perspective of heritage, with a particular stress on people-place relationship and interaction, the study unpacks and operationalizes the rich concept of social value. The resulting framework is applied to a specific place in Hong Kong to illustrate its capacity to raise the standards of assessments. The methods used in the study emphasize the importance of engaging the local community to better understand their relationship with place. Some policy implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Architecture and urban planning are deeply intertwined with the environment, which serves as a vessel for individual and collective human experiences that form memory. Memory studies, a rapidly growing research field, span various disciplines, including social sciences, humanities, landscape studies, architecture, and urbanism. In Iran and worldwide, research has explored memory in built environments from diverse perspectives. This article seeks to analyze and interpret the body of work published in Iran, aiming to prevent redundancy in this field while identifying existing research gaps. Methodology: This research adheres to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) statement list for information collection and document screening. The study sample was selected based on internet searches of related keywords (e.g., memory and place memory) across Mogiran, SID, and Ganj-Irandoc scientific databases. No time limits were set for the search, but the focus was on publications between 2006 and 2022. Initially, 206 articles were retrieved from the Mogiran site, 101 articles from SID, and 16 doctoral theses related to architecture and urban planning. Following a thorough screening process that involved reviewing titles, abstracts, and content relevance, a final selection of 38 articles from scientific research publications was made, rated from A to D in the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology’s scientific publications portal. Additionally, 4 doctoral theses were selected for in-depth review after similar screening. To systematically extract and categorize information, a table was designed based on each article’s publication year. The data analysis and interpretation were conducted through coding and grouping similar content. This systematic approach enabled the authors to interpret and describe various aspects of the phenomenon under study, ultimately contributing to a comprehensive understanding of place memory in Persian language research. Results and Discussion: This research focuses on the publication and evolution of scientific studies on place memory in Iran, examining both the structure and content of these studies. A central theme in the research is the concept of collective or individual memory. The majority of studies emphasize collective memory, a shared memory among the people of a region or city, often detached from individual experiences. In the context of place memory, the processes of memory formation, recording, transmission, continuity, and recall are distinct yet interconnected. Depending on the research’s case study—whether it involves a city, village, single building, or urban space—these processes include various components. Generally, these components can be categorized into three main groups: spatial, social, and emotional. Sociologists like Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora have noted that the sociability of a space significantly influences collective memory. One result of sociability is face-to-face communication, which relies on the space’s ability to accommodate people together—a crucial factor in memory studies. In essence, a space’s potential to become memorable is closely tied to its capacity for social interaction and presence. Interestingly, few articles explore the topic of memory in relation to homes that are not linked to childhood experiences. Another notable issue is the relationship between age and memory. From an early age, individuals develop positive and negative feelings toward their environment, which can be shaped by physical changes in residential areas. Such changes not only impact children’s spatial behavior but also influence their psychological development. When public spaces fail to consider children’s needs, expectations, and desires, their design—crafted solely by adults— can negatively affect children’s social, cultural, and mental development. Public spaces are often the only areas where children can play and socialize outside their homes and schools. This underscores the importance of creating environments that engage children constructively, making residential areas where significant childhood memories are formed more livable. Conclusion: The growing volume of studies in various fields necessitates summarizing and interpreting existing research, identifying frequently studied areas, and finding research gaps to inspire new topics for future exploration. This study addresses the critical issue of place memory within Persian language research through a systematic review. The relatively small number of existing studies in this field suggests that place memory research is still in its infancy, with limited depth and focus. The concept of memory has not yet reached saturation in any of the discussed fields, presenting future research opportunities. The most critical factor in strengthening memory in a place—sustaining mental patterns— has been scarcely discussed in the literature. Topics related to memory, such as revival and reconstruction in historical contexts, identity, belonging, and attachment to place, have been repeatedly examined. The importance of understanding identity and the solutions some researchers offer by referencing the past, alongside the growing trend of memory studies, highlight the significance of further exploring this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many contemporary theories of memory assume that everyone automatically stores temporal contextual information about all types of encountered information, yet most studies on this topic have used words and ignored individual differences. Five experiments accumulated evidence that explicit storage of temporal context information does not appear to occur automatically for all people and types of memoranda. We collected judgments of temporal position (memory-for-when) for words (Experiments 1 & 3), faces (Experiments 2A, 3, 4, and 5), and classrooms (Experiments 2B & 3). At the group level, for each of these memoranda memory-for-when was sensitive to the original input position and showed a temporal primacy effect reflecting better memory for position for items near the beginning of the list, indicating some automatic storage of temporal context information. However, memory-for-when was significantly better for words than classrooms, with faces in the middle. Moreover, individuals varied dramatically in their ability to indicate memory-for-when, especially for classrooms where many people performed at or near chance. Taken together, the data suggest that explicit memory-for-when may be dissociable from the more implicit use of temporal contextual information that is theorised to occur during free recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Britain's changing roadscapes are apprehended by the road-user with reference to my own experience of driving the same route between Scotland and Cornwall over the past quarter-century. My pre-millennial analysis of these journeys (published 2000) is compared with more recent driving-events and deploys the same multi-layered autoethnographic methods I first experimented with then. My central argument is concerned with the ways in which drivers and passengers both respond and contribute to such change vis-a-vis those aspects of their own autobiographies which are entwined with the 'lifecourse of the road' (Mikhail Bakhtin). The concept I have devised to account for the ways in which the materiality of the road is entangled with the cognitive and affective passage of the traveller is journeying: i.e. the means by which the individual journey is overlaid, and shaped, not only by previous journeys but also the life-journey of the traveller for whom a familiar route has special meaning. The analysis reveals the extent to which increased traffic and congestion has impacted upon the experience of driving long-distance routes as well as the critical role roadside landmarks (and their disappearance) play in orienting and disorienting the traveller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been research on the significance of placemaking as a process for user health and well-being and how that affects their way of life in urban planning and development. Creative placemaking, one of the most effective paradigms for making social sustainability, lacks community attributes for social cohesion in planning and design techniques for community spaces, which is the focus of the study. A conceptual model for the inclusion of the concept of creative placemaking in community open spaces to enhance social cohesion in residential environments are proposed in this study. The study employs a qualitative approach to determine the elements and indicators of creative place placemaking considering placemaking as a social process. Community open spaces in a residential neighbourhood were shown to be developing creative placemaking indicators based on theoretical Research VIZ: a) place attachment, b) connection to nature, c) sense of place, d) place memory, e) happy place mapping, and f) image and identity that altogether significantly could contribute towards effective social cohesion in these spaces.

There has been research on the significance of placemaking as a process for user health and well-being and how that affects their way of life in urban planning and development. Creative placemaking, one of the most effective paradigms for making social sustainability, lacks community attributes for social cohesion in planning and design techniques for community spaces, which is the focus of the study. A conceptual model for the inclusion of the concept of creative placemaking in community open spaces to enhance social cohesion in residential environments are proposed in this study. The study employs a qualitative approach to determine the elements and indicators of creative place placemaking considering placemaking as a social process. Community open spaces in a residential neighbourhood were shown to be developing creative placemaking indicators based on theoretical Research VIZ: a) place attachment, b) connection to nature, c) sense of place, d) place memory, e) happy place mapping, and f) image and identity that altogether significantly could contribute towards effective social cohesion in these spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between perceptual and conceptual knowledge is a longstanding research question in developmental psychology. Here we tested children's dependence on figurative information with a reaction time/accuracy task. A sample of 151 children from 5 to 10 years were assessed from two multicultural and multiracial schools in the London (UK) boroughs City of London and Harrow. A quarter of children in both schools were eligible for free school meals (national average 18.5%). The same 3 × 3 grid with nine individually colored places and a uniform black star as placeholder was tested in three different retrieval conditions: (a) same array as during presentation, (b) one place at a time with placeholder, and (c) one place at a time without placeholder. In a (d) control condition, individual shapes were of the same color as the colorful places. Bayes Factor analyses showed a more unified response toward figurative placeholders in 5- to 6-year-olds. Independently of age, colorful places without a placeholder were hardest to remember. Places were better remembered when a placeholder was added and still better when the spatial context of the entire array was available. Yet unique shapes with distinctive contours and colors as placeholders optimized place memory the most. While place memory accuracy increased with age, reaction times did not become faster. Instead, latencies were longer, the more visual information was available in the retrieval array. A larger perceptual effect was caused by the dynamic where-delay interference task, the sparser the amount of visual information in the retrieval array. Public Significance Statement: This study reversed the usual set up of asking children to remember where objects were located. Instead, each color of a grid had an individual color. Results revealed that when 5- to 10-year-old children were tested for locations, they needed as much visual information of the grid as possible in order to accurately identify a place. The less visual information they were given, the more interference was possible. Still, an individual colorful shape's place was remembered best. With regards to response times, the more visual information they were given, the longer they needed to make a decision, independently of their age. The youngest children did not make a difference in their response times whether a colorful shape or a black star was a placeholder showing they opted for figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a long time, the field of marine geography has been located at the edge of the discipline, strengthening the terrestrial bias of human geography. Fishermen, one of the few action actors in the ocean, have natural mobility characteristics. Existing research on fishermen pays more attention to the temporal and spatial regulations and distribution of their mobility than the social and cultural connotations generated in the process of their flow. From the perspective of mobility and collective memory, a typical fishing village in the east of Hainan Province was selected as a case study, and through participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, and text analysis, the construction of the local memory of fishermen in the process of mobility was comprehensively understood. In this study, the following points were found: First, according to research on the new paradigm of mobility, the world interact with each other through the flow of nodes and the space of flows, with emphasis on liquidity from the state of "flow, berthing, settled" in three different space-time conceptions to describe the world, thus inferring the Hainan fishermen's marine mobility, at least in the scope of time and space, material basis, and the paths of nodes. Second, collective memory is an important way for fishermen to interact with each other and construct emotions in the flow process. The core of this is fishing and hunting culture and the cross-border network. Three points should be made clear when discussing the collective memory of fishermen from the perspective of mobility: First, collective memory is essentially based on the "present" and a construction of the "past", and a change of subject will greatly affect the continuity and inheritance of memory. Second, memory is formed by personal emotions and objective environments. For fishermen, collective memory unfolds in a specific place, shifting with different spatial scales through a landscape of physical and symbolic memories. Third, geographical and social mobility complement each other, exacerbating the differences of fishermen and leading to the fragmentation or failing of collective memory. This paper makes two contributions to this concept: (1) Taking the phenomenon of the flow of fishermen as an example, the ocean is examined from the perspective of the ocean, emphasizing the importance of the connection between the ocean and land. It also goes beyond the land's perspective of the sea, indicating that the ocean is an equally important substrate for the integration of socio-cultural, political, and economic transformation processes and should not be regarded as a negative space of land. Instead, it is the center of the process of knowledge production, concrete experience, and understanding the transcendence of the present. (2) It responds to the attention of the new mobility paradigm to special space and compensates for the missing dimension of interaction between the marine environment and human activity.

This case study on the Kymi River Opera in south-eastern Finland, at the former border between Sweden and Russia, explores the potential of local operas to re-create a sense of place identity in a contemporary society in which people often seek to reconstruct identity through place memory. By engaging with Christopher Small’s (1998) idea of ‘musicking’ and drawing on studies of place identity and place memory, the study focuses on how a local opera can strive towards new identity constructions through revitalising the forgotten local, historical past. Based on a purposive sample, the data consists of semi-structured interviews and direct observation of the participants of the Kymi River Opera. Three thematic areas on the meanings of the opera, as conveyed by the participants, were identified in the abductive qualitative analysis: 1) Construction of a new place memory; 2) Equal possibility for participation; and 3) Integration of cultural politics and educational goals. The findings show the political nature of local opera in describing how the Kymi River Opera has become an arena for the politics of memory and place-making after a municipal merger in the 1990s had resulted in a sense of loss of local identity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public spaces are essential for any city as they define place character; they are the meeting point for social and cultural actions. Place attachment is moulded by the tie between individuals and places. The research examines the historic streets, which are remainders of their period when the pedestrian flow was predominant and had exceptional qualities that supported social action. The changed settings nowadays might have changed people’s views and the investigation was made to question and check individual’s common memory and their sensitive ties to the historic streets. The four streets from the Walled City of Lahore were selected upon their significance of history and usage. The questionnaires were prepared and the fieldwork analysis was conducted face to face and selected streets were investigated in the terms of, place attachment, identity, and memory. The outcome proved that there is a promising feeling of attachment towards the selected streets and lacking qualities of a street can be improved if look closely at the worthy streets. The study addressed an important issue of marginalization and the results from the Shah-Almi street shows that their act will create the walled city streets to lose their identity as it is formed by its users.

Aims: The present study aimed to develop a theoretical model that explores the influence of recalling place memory on cooperative behaviors in local communities., Methods: Five hundred ninety-five Japanese residents (mean age = 49.75 years) participated in an online survey, in which they received one of the three interventions: (1) positive memory; (2) neutral memory and (3) negative memory. Participants were instructed to recall their place memories within their living areas and provide ratings for their place attachment, emotional valence, perceived self-interest, and willingness to engage in cooperative behaviors., Results: The results revealed that individuals who recalled positive-valenced place memories exhibited a higher willingness to engage in cooperative behaviors. Additionally, this study reveals the previously unreported mediating role of place attachment and perceived self-interest in promoting cooperative behaviors., Conclusion: The findings hold significance in elucidating the relationship between place memory and cooperative behaviors, offering novel insights for community management., (© 2024 The Author(s). Journal of Community Psychology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

For a long time, the field of marine geography has been located at the edge of the discipline, strengthening the terrestrial bias of human geography. Fishermen, one of the few action actors in the ocean, have natural mobility characteristics. Existing research on fishermen pays more attention to the temporal and spatial regulations and distribution of their mobility than the social and cultural connotations generated in the process of their flow. From the perspective of mobility and collective memory, a typical fishing village in the east of Hainan Province was selected as a case study, and through participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, and text analysis, the construction of the local memory of fishermen in the process of mobility was comprehensively understood. In this study, the following points were found: First, according to research on the new paradigm of mobility, the world interact with each other through the flow of nodes and the space of flows, with emphasis on liquidity from the state of "flow, berthing, settled" in three different space-time conceptions to describe the world, thus inferring the Hainan fishermen's marine mobility, at least in the scope of time and space, material basis, and the paths of nodes. Second, collective memory is an important way for fishermen to interact with each other and construct emotions in the flow process. The core of this is fishing and hunting culture and the cross-border network. Three points should be made clear when discussing the collective memory of fishermen from the perspective of mobility: First, collective memory is essentially based on the "present" and a construction of the "past", and a change of subject will greatly affect the continuity and inheritance of memory. Second, memory is formed by personal emotions and objective environments. For fishermen, collective memory unfolds in a specific place, shifting with different spatial scales through a landscape of physical and symbolic memories. Third, geographical and social mobility complement each other, exacerbating the differences of fishermen and leading to the fragmentation or failing of collective memory. This paper makes two contributions to this concept: (1) Taking the phenomenon of the flow of fishermen as an example, the ocean is examined from the perspective of the ocean, emphasizing the importance of the connection between the ocean and land. It also goes beyond the land's perspective of the sea, indicating that the ocean is an equally important substrate for the integration of sociocultural, political, and economic transformation processes and should not be regarded as a negative space of land. Instead, it is the center of the process of knowledge production, concrete experience, and understanding the transcendence of the present. (2) It responds to the attention of the new mobility paradigm to special space and compensates for the missing dimension of interaction between the marine environment and human activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we will examine the significance of place and music within Steinbeck's work. In particular, we will explore how Steinbeck's conception of place in his ancestral County Derry has figured as part of a wider transatlantic discourse in which writers have looked to this area in the north of Ireland to explore their sense of their personal and familial identity. As part of this process, the idealization of space and memory through the literature, history, and heritage "of the people" has been invoked. In contrast, we will compare Steinbeck's approach with that of two writers also connected to the area, the New Hampshire poet Robert Dinsmoor and the song collector Sam Henry. The former, of Scotch-Irish descent, had a negative view of his family's stay in Ireland; the latter, who lived most of his life in Ireland, was a champion of the area and sought to promote an authentic as possible record of local song and culture. We will maintain that Steinbeck's sense of his people differs sharply with these two authors and offers an alternative version of the place and people as the returning American whose Ireland is more enigmatic and literary than either Dinsmoor's or Henry's Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Janghang is a planned city that has three defined areas of urban infrastructure: a smelting factory, railway, and port. These were built one by one in the 1930s after the land was reclaimed on a large scale to exploit rice and gold production during Japanese colonial rule. For the last 90 years, Janghang has gone through booms and busts as a modern industrial city, symbolising Korea's rapid economic development, urbanisation and industrialisation in a short period of time. These three urban infrastructures have formed the local identity of Janghang, leaving behind industrial structures of the past. Industrial remains have the potential to strengthen local regeneration and social cohesion in the local community. Meanwhile, while various regeneration projects are currently underway in Janghang, they have caused problems as they have focused too much on outcomes in a top-down manner led by local government. In this paper, the author proposes that a regeneration project should be conducted in the following manner: stage 1 — status survey and documentation; stage 2 — listing of industrial remains; stage 3 — turning industrial remains into assets; stage 4 — local identity and master plan; stage 5 — public project; stage 6 — reuse of industrial remains. In addition, each stakeholder in local regeneration should play their specific role: experts should document the local area's history and discover its identity; local government should put in place the policy and management systems to turn local industrial remains into assets and set appropriate budgets; and local residents should preserve, use, and continue to reimagine industrial remains and benefit from local regeneration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The campus buildings carry the reading time and historical stories, while the dormitories carry the memories and dreams of college students. This article takes the Wushan Dormitory of SCAU University as an example. By digging into the main narrative elements of the internal space of the Wushan Dormitory, the relationship between its space and events is analyzed. Based on the perspective of narratology, the convex space analysis method using Depthmap software technology under the space syntax theory is used to analyze the dormitory narrative space from the three main levels of the bedroom space, corridor space and staircase space. Analyze and explore the connection value of the horizon and the depth of the vision so as to effectively and reasonably combine the qualitative theory of narratology with the quantitative analysis of space syntax. By observing the logical relationship between the internal space and space of the dormitory building, the relationship between the dormitory building and the campus, it is theoretically and systematically explained, and people’s understanding of the space narrative theory is deepened. Reference suggestions are given for the activation and protection of the inner and outer spaces of the Wushan Dormitory in the future. The campus buildings carry the reading time and historical stories, while the dormitories carry the memories and dreams of college students. This article takes the Wushan Dormitory of SCAU University as an example. By digging into the main narrative elements of the internal space of the Wushan Dormitory, the relationship between its space and events is analyzed. Based on the perspective of narratology, the convex space analysis method using Depthmap software technology under the space syntax theory is used to analyze the dormitory narrative space from the three main levels of the bedroom space, corridor space and staircase space. Analyze and explore the connection value of the horizon and the depth of the vision so as to effectively and reasonably combine the qualitative theory of narratology with the quantitative analysis of space syntax. By observing the logical relationship between the internal space and space of the dormitory building, the relationship between the dormitory building and the campus, it is theoretically and systematically explained, and people’s understanding of the space narrative theory is deepened. Reference suggestions are given for the activation and protection of the inner and outer spaces of the Wushan Dormitory in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to determine the extent to which people can participate in efforts to preserve cultural heritage in the city of Palopo. Community participation is measured based on their cognition attachment to cultural heritage buildings in Palopo City. Cognition can be seen from how people can recall how the characteristics of cultural heritage buildings in Palopo City (place memory). Data were collected by interview technique and analyzed by the content analysis technique. The analysis results show that the form of place memory of the Palopo City community towards cultural heritage buildings can be categorized into the location of the building, the function of the building, the physical characteristics of the building. The attachment of the Palopo City community towards cultural heritage buildings is evidenced by the efforts to preserve. Therefore, it is hoped that the results of this study can be one of the considerations for the preservation of cultural heritage buildings in Palopo City.

Biased memory of the past is often a starting point for intergroup conflicts. In three correlational studies, we examined the relationship between need for closure (NFC) and historical ethnocentric bias, a tendency to overestimate the role of one's ethnic group in the multicultural history of the city of residence. In addition, we checked whether this relationship would be mediated by an individual preference for essentialist places. We found that higher NFC was related to increased historical ethnocentric bias. Moreover, this relation was mediated by preference for an essentialist type of a place. Our results may contribute to understanding the role of individual differences and preferred type of place in shaping a biased representation of the past. Furthermore, our research findings point to the importance of raising awareness of the multicultural past among high NFC individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public spaces are essential for any city as they define place character; they are the meeting point for social and cultural actions. Place attachment is moulded by the tie between individuals and places. The research examines the historic streets, which are remainders of their period when the pedestrian flow was predominant and had exceptional qualities that supported social action. The changed settings nowadays might have changed people's views and the investigation was made to question and check individual's common memory and their sensitive ties to the historic streets. The four streets from the Walled City of Lahore were selected upon their significance of history and usage. The questionnaires were prepared and the fieldwork analysis was conducted face to face and selected streets were investigated in the terms of, place attachment, identity, and memory. The outcome proved that there is a promising feeling of attachment towards the selected streets and lacking qualities of a street can be improved if look closely at the worthy streets. The study addressed an important issue of marginalization and the results from the Shah-Almi street shows that their act will create the walled city streets to lose their identity as it is formed by its users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preference for spatial locations to maximize favorable outcomes and minimize aversive experiences helps animals survive and adapt to the changing environment. Both visual and non-visual cues play a critical role in spatial navigation and memory of a place supports and guides these strategies. Here we present the neural, genetic and behavioral processes involved in place memory formation using Drosophila melanogaster with a focus on non-visual cue based spatial memories. The work presented here highlights the work done by Dr. Troy Zars and his colleagues with an emphasis on role of biogenic amines in learning, cell biological mechanisms of neural systems and behavioral plasticity of place conditioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is based on field research in Peace Neighborhood in Shanghai (2016–2018), where I followed a small group of "nail householders" (dingzihu 钉子户) protesting the upcoming demolition of their neighborhood, and recorded their stories. Whereas previous studies on nail householders have focused on the residents' strategies claiming their rights, I aim to add a subjective dimension to better understand the individual experience of forced eviction as an intrusion on people's sense of place and belonging. Taking the oral stories by one of the residents as my main focus, I argue that the act of storytelling itself can become an important form of urban resistance, recapturing a sense of being acting subjects in the face of experiences that make people feel powerless, unseen, and unheard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the meaning of place in studying vernacular memory as a phenomenon that is both the "carrier" of social actors' memory and a product of the narrative, the meanings, values, and emotions that the actors attribute to place and the actions they take in response. The author used small town and their neighboring villages as a case study to demonstrate the complexity of the connections between place and memory and its consequences to conducting fieldwork. The main sources upon which the article is based are materials from research conducted by Polish and Ukrainian researchers in 2017--2019 on the memory of Poland and Ukraine after World War II. The study consisted of personal interviews and observations, supplemented by analysis of documents. The article reflects how biographical experiences accumulate in a place, forming the locus type of memory, where a particular perspective of involvement in a past event, the emotions felt, and the body's reactions interweave with the interpretations, meanings, and meanings values attached to them in later life. It is challenging for the researcher to find oneself in this unique topography of memory, summoned not so much with words as gestures, glances, facial expressions, and even timbre of voice. In such a situation, the researcher must endeavor to come close to how the interlocutor experiences, remembers, and imagines this place. Among these meanings are the emotions expressed in the interview, which become a chance to understand the memory in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Top–down processing has been highlighted as a potential, but as yet understudied, aspect of restorative environmental experience. In an online study, N = 234 adults resident in Finland rated their favorite Finnish place on measures of perceived restorativeness, perceived restorative outcomes, and place attachment, and provided qualitative descriptions of the place and a positive memory associated with it. Thematic analysis of qualitative data revealed seven themes underpinning place memories: the environment itself, activities within it, cognitive responses, emotional responses, social context, self, and time. Mediated regression analyses showed positive and significant relationships between restorative perceptions and the presence of memories of self and time, as mediated via place attachment (place identity factor). These findings emphasize the contribution of the person to the perception of their restorative experiences in places, particularly in the form of personal memories that can enhance place identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) is a risk factor for weight gain and metabolic disease. Whether this risk is reduced by switching to ‘diet’ beverages containing low-calorie sweeteners (LCS) is controversial. Two experiments modeled whether a switch from SSB to LCS beverages produced positive outcomes on behavioral and metabolic measures. Both experiments consisted of a Stage 1, in which adult female rats received unrestricted access to 10% sucrose solution in addition to chow and water for 4 (Experiment 1) or 8 weeks (Experiment 2). In Stage 2 rats were switched to either saccharin ( Suc-Sacch ) or water ( Suc-Water ) or remained on 10% sucrose ( Suc-Suc ) for a further 4 (Experiment 1) or 7 weeks (Experiment 2). Experiment 2 contained a fourth group that was maintained on water throughout ( Water-Water ). In both experiments energy intake and weight gain in Stage 2 was reduced for Suc-Sacch and Suc-Water groups relative to the Suc-Suc groups and at cull the Suc-Suc groups showed poorer insulin sensitivity and greater g/kg fat than Suc-Water and Suc-Sacch groups. In Experiment 2 short-term place recognition memory was impaired at the end of Stage 1 but recovered to a similar extent in the Suc-Water and Suc-Sacch groups; when the latter groups were compared with the Water-Water group, recovery was found to be essentially complete. A higher saccharin concentration in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1 increased absolute amounts of saccharin ingested but intake solution volumes remained low. These results show that switching from sucrose to either water or saccharin produces equivalent improvements on both metabolic and cognitive measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research linking favourite places and restorative environments hypothesises that place memory and place attachment can be implicated in restorative perceptions of place. In the present study, conducted with an online paradigm, 234 Finnish residents rated an imagined favourite place on place memory properties, place attachment, and imagined restorative perceptions. Autobiographical and positive affective properties of place memory were consistently predictive of perceived restorative potential of place. Attachment in the form of place identity and place dependence also positively predicted of restorative perceptions, and mediated certain relationships between memory properties and restorative perceptions. These findings highlight the relevance of top-down processing of restorative environments according to past experiences and individual attachments. This understudied topic may shed light on semantic values underpinning restoration in a range of settings, including favourite places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated sex differences on the competitive place version of the Morris water maze task to determine whether potential strategy differences would emerge during any phase of the study but in particular on the competitive place phase. Previous findings indicate that this version of the task is highly sensitive to measures that disrupt NMDA-dependent synaptic plasticity within the hippocampus during memory consolidation (McDonald et al., 2005). The present findings revealed significant sex differences during all phases of the study, including Phase I with standard place training to located a hidden platform/goal, Phase II mass training to a new place with the platform/goal relocated to the diagonally opposite quadrant and Phase III, competitive place probe test with the platform removed to measure spatial behaviour directed at either location. The findings showed no sex difference in escape latency and other standard performance measures during the first two phases, initial place acquisition and mass training to a new location. A very subtle male advantage in visiting both Old and New place locations during the third phase place competition test was observed, however, in the time spent swimming in the periphery of the pool, the pool wall (Zone C – outer third radial distance) was increased for females during all phases of the study, suggesting a general effect may have influenced place location search behaviour of the females. Increased peripheral pool time may represent a female preference for approaching the wall, a local cue. Alternatively, the possibility that increased peripheral swimming/thigmotaxis may represent hormonal influences interacting with strategic preferences were discussed, though no definitive conclusions about sex differences in cognitive-spatial performance or memory consolidation were inferred from the present findings. The findings suggest that mixed results reported in the literature by others may be due in part to an interaction with a persistent peripheral pool swimming response demonstrated in female rats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]