Ricerc@Sapienza

We examined whether stereotype threat affects older adults’ eyewitness memory and whether prior task success can improve older adults’ eyewitness memory. In Experiment 1, older adults were placed under stereotype threat or not; then they viewed a video of a crime and later attempted to recall it. Participants in the threat condition remembered fewer person, object, action, and location details from the video and were less accurate answering questions on a cued-recall task than those who were not under threat.

The present study examined predictions of the early-phase-elevated-attention hypothesis of the attentional boost effect (ABE), which suggests that transient increases in attention at encoding, as instantiated in the ABE paradigm, should enhance the recognition of neutral and positive items (whose encoding is mostly based on controlled processes), while having small or null effects on the recognition of negative items (whose encoding is primarily based on automatic processes).

Musical expertise has positive effects on cognition, especially on verbal and linguistic processing. In this study
the relationships between musical expertise, not involving improvisation training, and divergent thinking were
explored. Expert and self-taught musicians were tested in musical, verbal and visual divergent thinking, and
were compared with a group of non-musicians in verbal and visual divergent thinking. The musical task required
to generate many different pieces of music using the incipit of ‘Happy Birthday’ as a starting point; the verbal

Episodic autobiographical memory (EAM) is pivotal for the development and maintenance of personal identity. However, a theoretical debate still exists about where EAMs are stored in our brain and about hippocampal unique contribution to their recollection. Here we disentangled this issue performing an Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analysis on 79 neuroimaging experiments, classified according to the remoteness of EAMs, and meta-analytic connectivity modeling. A wide brain network, spanning from occipital to frontal lobe, was involved in recalling EAMs.

We often think of memory in terms of mentally reliving prior events. Such conscious recollection is, of course, an important aspect
of memory and has been a traditional way that researchers have defined and studied memory (James, 1890). However, it is also
clear that we are sometimes influenced by past experiences in the absence of conscious recollection. When we carry out a
well-learned motor skill, for instance, playing the piano or swinging a golf club, we are certainly influenced by past experiences

The investigation of the role of emotional landmarks on human navigation has been
almost totally neglected in psychological research. Therefore, the extent to which
positive and negative emotional landmarks affect topographical memory as compared
to neutral emotional landmark was explored. Positive, negative and neutral affectladen
images were selected as landmarks from the International Affective Picture
System (IAPS) Inventory. The Walking Corsi test (WalCT) was used in order to test the

We investigated the relationship between verbal and visuo-spatial measures of working memory, inhibition, fluid intelligence and the performance on the Tower of London (ToL) task in a large sample of 830 healthy participants aged between 18 and 71 years. We found that fluid intelligence and visuo-spatial working memory accounted for a significant variance in the ToL task, while performances on verbal working memory and on the Stroop Test were not predictive for performance on the ToL.

Cannabinoid drugs often induce biphasic effects on cognitive and emotional behavior depending on the level of stress and emotional arousal at the time of drug consumption. The effects of stress on endocannabinoids appear to be regionally specific and time-dependent relative to exposure to stress. Stress-induced changes in corticosterone affect memory.

Amphetamine is a potent psychostimulant which increases the release of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter crucially involved in the regulation of memory for stressful experiences. Here we investigated amphetamine effects on consolidation of long term object recognition memory in rats exposed to different stressful conditions. In a second set of experiments, we evaluated whether such effects were dependent on the activation of the peripheral adrenergic system.

The endocannabinoid system plays a key role in the control of emotional responses to environmental challenges. CB1 receptors are highly expressed within cortico-limbic brain areas, where they modulate stress effects on memory processes. Glucocorticoid and endocannabinoid release is influenced by circadian rhythm. Here, we investigated how different stress intensities immediately after encoding influence rat short-term memory in an object recognition task, whether the effects depend on circadian rhythm and if exogenous augmentation of anandamide levels could restore any observed impairment.