Knowledge that Transforms

We describe the extraordinary memory of C, a 21-year-old student who experiences synesthetic colors (i.e., photisms) when she sees, hears, or thinks of digits. Using three matrices of 50 digits, we tested C and 7 nonsynesthetes to evaluate whether C's synesthetic photisms influence her memory for digits. One matrix consisted of black digits, whereas the other two matrices consisted of digits that were either incongruent or congruent with the colors of C's photisms. C's recall of the incongruently colored digits was considerably poorer than her recall of either the black or the congruently colored digits. The 7 nonsynesthetes did not show such differences in their recall of the matrices. In addition, when immediate recall of the black digits was compared with delayed recall of those digits (48 hr), C showed no decrease in performance, whereas each of the nonsynesthetes showed a significant decrease. These findings both demonstrate C's extraordinary memory and show that her synesthetic photisms can influence her memory for digits.

A concert pianist recorded her practice as she learned the third movement, Presto, of J.S. Bach's Italian Concerto. She also described the formal structure of the piece and reported her decisions about basic features (e.g., fingering), interpretive features (e.g., phrasing), and cues to attend to during performance (performance cues). These descriptions were used to identify which locations, features, and cues she practiced most, which caused hesitations when she first played from memory, and which affected her recall 2 years later. Effects of the formal structure and performance cues on all three activities indicated that the pianist used the formal structure as a retrieval scheme and performance cues as retrieval cues. Like expert memorists in other domains, she engaged in extended retrieval practice, going to great lengths to ensure that retrieval was as rapid and automatic from conceptual (declarative) memory as from motor and auditory memory.

Recognizing spoken language involves automatic activation of multiple candidate words. The process of selection between candidates is made more efficient by inhibition of embedded words (like egg in beg) that leave a portion of the input stranded (here, b). Results from European languages suggest that this inhibition occurs when consonants are stranded but not when syllables are stranded. The reason why leftover syllables do not lead to inhibition could be that in principle they might themselves be words; in European languages, a syllable can be a word. In Sesotho (a Bantu language), however, a single syllable cannot be a word. We report that in Sesotho, word recognition is inhibited by stranded consonants, but stranded monosyllables produce no more difficulty than stranded bisyllables (which could be Sesotho words). Thisfinding suggests that the viability constraint which inhibits spurious embedded word candidates is not sensitive to language-specific word structure, but is universal.

The repeated retrieval of a subset of previously learned items can cause forgetting of the nonretrieved items. The study reported here investigated whether retrieval-induced forgetting generalizes to a situation in which the retrieved and nonretrieved items are not part of the same experiential episode and task. Subjects learned an item list that they had to recall later in the experiment. In a separate intermediate phase, they repeatedly generated related items from semantic memory, or were presented the same items intact for study. Only the semantic generation of items, and not their presentation for study, induced forgetting of the initially learned items. This result indicates that, first, semantic generation can cause recall-specific episodic forgetting and, second, retrieval-induced forgetting can occur even if the retrieved and nonretrieved items belong to different experiential episodes and tasks. Connections of the present results to other memory phenomena, such as part-set cuing and the generation effect, social cognition, and eyewitness memory, are discussed.

Demonstrations of cognitive competence in preschool children and infants played an important role in the waning influence of Piagetian theory and the rise of nativism. Arguments and data favoring modularity have further buttressed the casefor nativism. This article reviews evidence concerning early competence and modularity in the spatial and quantitative domains, as well as the role of experience in development. This evidence provides little reason to support nativist claims in either domain.

We examined the relative stability of pitch, tempo, and rhythm in maternal speech and singing to prelinguistic infants. Mothers were recorded speaking and singing to their infants on two occasions separated by 1 week or more. The pitch level and tempo of identical utterances were highly variable across the 1-week period, but these features were virtually unchanged in song repetitions. Rhythmic patterning was largely maintained in speech, as in song. Mothers' accurate reproduction of their sung performances can be considered a form of absolute pitch and absolute tempo.

Several theorists have claimed that men are innately more upset by a mate's sexual infidelity and women are more upset by a mate's emotional infidelity because the sexes faced different adaptive problems (for men, cuckoldry; for women, losing a mate's resources). The present work examined this theory of jealousy as a specific innate module in 196 adult men and women of homosexual and heterosexual orientations. As in previous work, heterosexuals' responses to a forced-choice question about hypothetical infidelity yielded a gender difference. However no gender differences were found when participants recalled personal experiences with a mate's actual infidelity. Men and women, regardless of sexual orientation, on average focused more on a mate's emotional infidelity than on a mate's sexual infidelity. Responses to hypothetical infidelity were uncorrelated with reactions to actual infidelity. This finding casts doubt on the validity of the hypothetical measures used in previous research.

How do people feel about unexpected positive and negative outcomes? Decision affect theory (DAT) proposes that people feel displeasure when their outcomes fall short of the counterfactual alternative and elated when their outcomes exceed the counterfactual alternative. Because disconfirmed expectations provide a counterfactual alternative, DAT predicts that bad outcomes feel worse when unexpected than when expected, yet good outcomes feel better when unexpected than when expected. Consistency theories propose that people experience displeasure when their expectations are disconfirmed because the disconfirmation suggests an inability to predict. According to consistency theories, both good and bad outcomes feel worse when unexpected than when expected. These two theoretical approaches were tested in three studies. The results consistently support DAT

Are age differences in source memory inevitable? The two experiments reported here examined the hypothesis that the type of source information being tested mediates the magnitude of age differences in source memory. In these studies, participants listened to statements made by two different speakers. We compared younger and older adults' source memory in a traditional perceptual source task (memory for voice) and in two affective, conceptually based source tasks (truth of the statements, character of a person in a photo). In both studies, the perceptual and conceptual source information were conveyed in the same manner, as one speaker was associated with one type of information (e.g., female voice speaks truth). Age differences were robust for decisions regarding who said each statement but were negligible or truth or character decisions. These findings are provocative because they suggest that the type of information can influence age-related patterns of performance for source-conveyed information.

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