Older Adults as Adaptive Decision Makers: Evidence From the Iowa Gambling Task.

Older adults process emotional information differently than younger adults and may demonstrate less of a negativity bias on cognitive tasks. The Iowa Gambling Task designed by A. Bechara, H. Damasio, D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio (1997) has been used to examine the integration of emotion and cognition in a risky-choice decision task and may give insight into differences in the decision-making strategies in younger and older adults. Eighty-eight younger adults (18-34 years) and 67 older adults (65-88 years) completed the Iowa Gambling Task. Using a theoretical decomposition of the task designed by J. R. Busemeyer and J. C. Stout (2002), the authors found that both groups were successful at solving the task but used very different strategies that reflected each group's strength. For younger adults, that strength was learning and memory. For older adults, that strength was an accurate representation of wins and losses (valence). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inhibition of cerebral protein synthesis does not prolong short-term memory.

In 4 experiments, male Swiss-Webster CD-1 mice were given a single sc injection of a cerebral protein synthesis inhibitor, anisomycin (ANI, 1 mg/S), 20 min prior to a single trial of passive avoidance training. Ss demonstrated impaired retention at test given 3 hrs, 6 hrs, 1 day, and 7 days after training. Retention was not significantly different from that of saline controls when tests were given .5 or 1.5 hrs after training. Prolonging inhibition of brain protein synthesis by giving either 1 or 2 additional injections of ANI at 2 hrs or at 2 and 4 hrs after training did not prolong good retention performance. The temporal development of impaired retention in ANI-treated Ss could not be accounted for by drug dosage, duration of protein synthesis inhibition, or nonspecific sickness at test. In contrast to the suggestion that protein synthesis inhibition prolongs short-term memory, these results indicate that short-term memory is not prolonged by antibiotic drugs that inhibit cerebral protein synthesis. All evidence seems consistent with the hypothesis that short-term memory is independent of protein synthesis and that the establishment of long-term memory depends on protein synthesis during or shortly after training. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical priming deficits as a function of age.

The effects of age on implicit memory were assessed in elderly and young adults using 2 priming procedures. Subjects also completed the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Revised (WAIS—R), 3 tests to assess frontal lobe function, and 2 recall and 2 recognition tests of explicit memory. In Experiment 1, subjects were exposed to the low-frequency member of a homophone pair in a test purported to assess general knowledge. Subsequently, subjects completed a spelling test that contained the previously presented homophones to assess priming. Young subjects demonstrated priming (p?p?p?     

Biological psychology's relationships to psychology and neuroscience.

Biological psychology originally had a central role in psychology, but many psychologists who perform research traditionally done within the realm of biological psychology are shifting to the new discipline of neuroscience. We document this shift by showing that biological psychologists have a larger relative representation in the Society for Neuroscience (SN) than in the American Psychological Association (APA). They make up the third largest group within the SN, and psychology has the single largest departmental representation among SN student members. Investigations assessing behavior are reported at annual meetings of the SN and in the Society's official journal at a level consistent with psychologists' representation in the Society. A survey of graduate students training in biological psychology shows a strong affiliation with the discipline of neuroscience. These students indicate a greater likelihood of joining the SN than the APA; they believe the SN better represents their individual interests and the discipline of biological psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Induction using term orders

We present a procedure for proving inductive theorems which is based on explicit induction, yet supports mutual induction. Mutual induction allows the postulation of lemmas whose proofs use the theorems ex hypothesi while the theorems themselves use the lemmas. This feature has always been supported by induction procedures based on Knuth-Bendix completion, but these procedures are limited by the use of rewriting (or rewriting-like) inferences. Our procedure avoids this limitation by making explicit the implicit induction realized by these procedures. As a result, arbitrary deduction mechanisms can be used while still allowing mutual induction. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of the 12th Conference on Automated Deduction, A. Bundy, editor. This author was supported by a grant from the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, France.     

Protein synthesis and memory: A review.

Reviews studies that have used protein synthesis inhibitors to test the hypothesis that memory in part depends on brain protein synthesis. Evidence from learning curves, examination of short-term retention, and posttraining drug injection indicate that initial acquisition is not dependent on such synthesis, but it appears that protein synthesis, during or shortly after training, is an essential step in the formation of long-term memory. Possible side effects of protein synthesis inhibitors are considered in terms of locomotor activity, abnormal cerebral electrical activity, conditioned aversion, and catecholamine biosynthesis. Stages of memory formation are discussed, and the possibility that kindling, drug tolerance, and enzyme induction are dependent on protein synthesis is considered. (8 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Loss of hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons correlates with memory impairment in rats with ischemic or neurotoxin lesions.

Rats were trained for 20 days in a modified T maze to perform an invariant, tactile discrimination and a variable, delayed spatial discrimination, and then were exposed either to 30 min of transient forebrain ischemia or to low- or high-dose ibotenic acid to damage the dorsal hippocampus bilaterally. Only rats exposed to ischemia or high-dose ibotenic acid demonstrated impaired performance during 30 postoperative test days on both aspects of the task (p?p?     

Allocentric spatial and tactile memory impairments in rats with dorsal caudate lesions are affected by preoperative behavioral training.

Rats with caudate lesions and pretrained for 36 trials demonstrated impaired performance on the "reference memory" or invariant aspect of a 12-arm maze and normal performance on the "working memory" or variable aspect of the maze. Rats with caudate lesions and no pretraining were also impaired on an invariant tactile discrimination in a T maze, but they were not impaired on the variable goal-arm choice of the T maze. More extensive preoperative training ameliorated behavioral deficits of rats with caudate lesions in the T maze and radial arm maze. Results showed that behavioral impairment after damage to the caudate is not restricted to egocentric tasks as previously suggested, but the caudate seems to be involved in the initial acquisition that is invariant over many trials. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)