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This article examines the combined effects of what mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot has termed "Noah" and "Joseph" effects in U.S. national government budgeting. Noah effects, which reference the biblical great flood, are large changes or punctuations, far larger than could be expected given the Gaussian or Normal models that social scientists typically employ. Joseph effects refer to the seven fat and seven lean years that Joseph predicted to the Pharaoh. They are "near cycles" or "runs" in time series that look cyclical, but are not, because they do not occur on a regular, predictable basis. The Joseph effect is long‐term memory in time series. Public expenditures in the United States from 1800 to 2004 shows clear Noah and Joseph effects. For the whole budget, these effects are strong prior to World War II (WWII) and weaker afterward. For individual programs, however, both effects are clearly detectable after WWII. Before WWII, budgeting was neither incremental nor well behaved because punctuations were even more severe and memory was not characterized by simple autoregressive properties. The obvious break that occurred after WWII could have signaled a regime shift in how policy was made in America, but even the more stable modern world is far more uncertain than the traditional incremental view.

Abstract We show that infants' long‐term memory representations for melodies are not just reduced to the structural features of relative pitches and durations, but contain surface or performance tempo‐ and timbre‐specific information. Using a head turn preference procedure, we found that after a one week exposure to an old English folk song, infants preferred to listen to a novel folk song, indicating that they remembered the familiarized melody. However, if the tempo (25% faster or slower) or instrument timbre (harp vs. piano) of the familiarized melody was changed at test, infants showed no preference, indicating that they remembered the specific tempo and timbre of the melodies. The results are consistent with an exemplar‐based model of memory in infancy rather than one in which structural features are extracted and performance features forgotten.

The article analyses narratives of massacres by German troops in two villages in Tuscany during the Second World War. It explores the mechanisms of construction of group memory, considering the recollections from the perspective of both their social patterning and their emotional quality. Working from Bloch's assertion that there is no difference between the representations of autobiographical memory and those of historical accounts, I argue that visual imagery associated with past traumatic experience is a fundamental part of oral narratives, and facilitates the passage from personal to public memories. Treating the memory as a form of intersubjective knowledge endowed with symbolic content, rather than as a unanimous, collective endeavour, I argue for an approach that integrates different disciplinary theories.

Long‐term recall memory, as indexed by deferred imitation, was assessed in 12‐month‐old infants. Independent groups of infants were tested after retention intervals of 3  min, 1 week and 4 weeks. Deferred imitation was assessed using the 'observation‐only' procedure in which infants were not allowed motor practice on the tasks before the delay was imposed. Thus, the memory could not have been based on re‐accessing a motor habit, because none was formed in the first place. After the delay, memory was assessed either in the same or a different environmental context from the one in which the adult had originally demonstrated the acts. In Experiments 1 and 3, infants observed the target acts while in an unusual environment (an orange and white polka‐dot tent), and recall memory was tested in an ordinary room. In Experiment 2, infants observed the target acts in their homes and were tested for memory in a university room. The results showed recall memory after all retention intervals, including the 4 week delay, with no effect of context change. Interestingly, the forgetting function showed that the bulk of the forgetting occurred during the first week. The findings of recall memory without motor practice support the view that infants as young as 12 months old use a declarative (nonprocedural) memory system to span delay intervals as long as 4 weeks.

AbstractThe dominant view of children's memory is that it is slow to develop and is inferior to adults'. Here we pitted 4‐year‐old children against adults in a test of verbatim recall of verbal material. Parents read a novel rhyming verse (and an integrated word list) as their child's bedtime story on ten consecutive days. A group of young adults listened to the verse, matching the exposure of children. All participants subsequently performed a free‐recall of the verse, verbatim. (Parents and young adults knew they would be tested; children did not.) Four‐year‐olds significantly outperformed both their parents and the young adults. There were no significant differences in the ability to recall the gist of the verse, nor the integrated word list, allaying concerns about differences in engagement or motivation. Verbatim recall of verse is a skill amenable to practice, and children, we argue, by virtue of the prominence of verse in their culture and their reliance on oral transmission, have honed this skill to exceed adults'.

AbstractLong-term memory (LTM) problems are associated with many psychiatric and neurological illnesses and are commonly measured using free and cued recall tasks. Although LTM has been linked with biologic mechanisms, the etiology of distinct LTM tasks is unknown. We studied LTM in 95 healthy female twin pairs identified through birth records in the state of Missouri. Performance on tasks of free recall of unrelated words, free and cued recall of categorized words, and the vocabulary section of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-R) were examined using structural equation modeling. Additive genetic and unique environmental factors influenced LTM and intelligence. Free recall of unrelated and categorized words, and cued recall of categorized words, were moderately heritable (55%, 38%, and 37%). WAIS-R vocabulary score was highly heritable (77%). Controlling for verbal intelligence in multivariate analyses of recall, two components of genetic influence on LTM were found; one for all three recall scores and one for free and cued categorized word recall. Recall of unrelated and categorized words is influenced by different genetic and environmental factors indicating heterogeneity in LTM. Verbal intelligence is etiologically different from LTM indicating that these two abilities utilize different brain functions.

Abstract The nonword repetition (NWR) test has been shown to be a good predictor of children's vocabulary size. NWR performance has been explained using phonological working memory, which is seen as a critical component in the learning of new words. However, no detailed specification of the link between phonological working memory and long‐term memory (LTM) has been proposed. In this paper, we present a computational model of children's vocabulary acquisition (EPAM‐VOC) that specifies how phonological working memory and LTM interact. The model learns phoneme sequences, which are stored in LTM and mediate how much information can be held in working memory. The model's behaviour is compared with that of children in a new study of NWR, conducted in order to ensure the same nonword stimuli and methodology across ages. EPAM‐VOC shows a pattern of results similar to that of children: performance is better for shorter nonwords and for wordlike nonwords, and performance improves with age. EPAM‐VOC also simulates the superior performance for single consonant nonwords over clustered consonant nonwords found in previous NWR studies. EPAM‐VOC provides a simple and elegant computational account of some of the key processes involved in the learning of new words: it specifies how phonological working memory and LTM interact; makes testable predictions; and suggests that developmental changes in NWR performance may reflect differences in the amount of information that has been encoded in LTM rather than developmental changes in working memory capacity.

Abstract

The serial position effects for television commercials were tested within a naturalistic setting in this study, at both the micro level and the macro level. Television viewers' brand memory (recall and recognition) for the 2006 Super Bowl commercials were analyzed. At the micro level, the serial position of each commercial in a same commercial pod was measured. When the length of a commercial pod was controlled for, an earlier position for a commercial generated better brand recall. When the number of preceding ads was held constant, a commercial in a pod with fewer ads generated better brand recognition. At the macro level, the serial position of each commercial pod within the whole Super Bowl game broadcast was measured. The commercial pods at earlier positions generated better brand memory. Both findings confirmed a strong primacy effect. Managerial implications of the findings were also discussed.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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