Conscious Recall Research Articles

Feeling-of-Knowing in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: Monitoring Knowledge Inaccessible to Conscious Recall

Feeling-of-Knowing was compared in left temporal, right temporal, and control subjects. Seizure patients, like controls, demonstrate knowledge of information that is not accessible to conscious recall, but they are less accurate in FOK judgments. Futhermore, there are significant differences between seizure patients and controls in the relationship between Feeling-of-Knowing and object level memory scores: (1) Controls spend more time searching memory for inaccessible information that is correctly identified on a later recognition test than they do for information that is incorrectly recognized. (2) Latency of correct recognition decreases as strength of FOK increases among controls, suggesting that controls correctly anticipate the outcome of memory search. These patterns of performance, which are consistent with an efficient memory search termination device, were not observed among seizure patients. The findings suggest that inaccurate Feeling-of-Knowing may play a role in inefficient memory search mechanisms in temporal lobe epilepsy.

Conscious awareness during general anaesthesia: relevance of autonomic signs and isolated arm movements as guides to depth of anaesthesia

Awareness by the anaesthetized patient of intraoperative events can occur and is generally understood, rightly or wrongly, to imply inadequate anaesthesia. However, the possibility that a patient may be awake and capable of communicating during general anaesthesia, yet have no conscious recall of this in the postoperative period, is not always recognized, nor is the significance of this phenomenon fully understood. This state, conscious awareness with amnesia, is, by definition, not detectable in the postoperative period except possibly by sophisticated psychological testing or hypnosis. A technique is described (the isolated forearm technique) which enables states of awareness to be detected intraoperatively. Difficulties arise in understanding conscious awareness with amnesia since, in terms of general anaesthesia, it is debatable whether a patient can be conscious and anaesthetized at the same time, or whether these states are, by definition, mutually exclusive. This chapter highlights some of the problems surrounding the definitions of consciousness and anaesthesia, and discusses the reliability of conventional monitoring in assessing the adequacy of general anaesthesia. Clinical data are also presented which confirm the view that neither changes in blood pressure, heart rate, sweating nor tear production, taken individually or in aggregate, can reliably predict when a patient may be awake during certain general anaesthetic techniques.

Recall, recognition and implicit memory for intra-anaesthetic events

Summary The retrieval of memories for events occurring during anaesthesia has been subject to quite intensive collaborative research between anaesthetists and psychologists over two decades. The results of this research have produced a profusion of positive, negative and contradictory results. Such marked variability is argued to be a consequence of the application of insensitive memory tasks and outdated theory, and to a general failure to control salient anaesthetic variables. Furthermore, most of the psychologically based studies have been conducted in an effective vacuum in that there has been little attempt to assess the anaesthetic state obtaining during the presentation of intraoperative information. This makes it very difficult to evaluate both positive and negative results. More recent studies have attempted to resolve this unsatisfactory and piecemeal approach. Tasks of ‘implicit memory’ show great promise as a means of establishing reliably whether a patient has retained information ‘heard’ during anaesthesia. The virtue of implicit memory is that it does not rely on conscious recall of the initial learning experience by the patient. There is also the recognition in more recent research that it is essential to attempt to correlate the anaesthetic state at the time of information presentation with the probability of later retrieval of that information. Research now offers the possibility of precluding the clinical problems of memory for anaesthesia while, at the same time, offering new insights to the functioning of human memory and consciousness.

Fact and fantasy in the seduction theory: a historical review.

This article surveys Freud's various versions of the seduction theory, from 1896 to 1933. It is concluded that the seduction theory had never been based on the patients' direct statements and conscious recall of seduction by the father in early childhood--unlike what Freud was to state much later (1933). This early seduction was mostly reconstructed by Freud from the patient's verbal material and behavior in treatment (including memories of sexual experiences from later childhood) which he interpreted as disguised and incomplete "reproductions" and reenactments of the original seduction trauma. Further, the external trauma was never meant to account by itself for the later neurotic symptoms. The "delayed action" of its unconscious memory, producing the repression of an event from the time of puberty, was a necessary part of the process. Thus internal psychic transformations and conflicts, anticipating Freud's later emphasis on fantasy and psychic reality, were already an intrinsic part of the seduction etiology of 1896. It is also noted that the father played no central role in the original theory as presented in 1896; it is only in the letters to Fliess that the father emerged as the prime seducer. The implications of this clarification of the seduction theory for the understanding of the changes and continuity in the development of Freud's theories are highlighted; their relevance to ongoing issues in psychoanalysis about the role of external trauma, fantasy, and reconstruction are briefly examined.

Use of hypnosis in criminology: discussion paper.

Memories of events which are unremarkable may pass unrecorded or may fade with the passage of time. In any situation of stress, anxiety may cloud the memory of the incident and in the case of some intensely frightening or humiliating experience such material may not be subject to voluntary conscious recall and may be repressed. A technique for uncovering certain 'forgotten' or repressed memories with the use of hypnosis is described. A similar method has been used in order to retrieve such memories in the investigation of witnesses and victims of serious crime. Nevertheless, various aspects of the overall validity of such a procedure have been called into question and for this reason the results of numerous experiments and the conclusions arrived at in many papers are discussed. It is emphasized that a rigid code of conduct be followed if hypnosis is to be used as an investigatory tool.

Relating age at encoding in early childhood to adult recall: Development of flashbulb memories.

Three hundred thirty-eight informants who were between 1 and 7 years of age in 1963 were asked about their personal memories surrounding assassination of President Kennedy and six other significant public events. The probability and degree of elaboration of recall showed a gradual growth function with increasing age at time of event for assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy but not for other events. Self-reports of amount of rehearsal showed a low correlation with recall. Recall was high for resignation of President Nixon in 1974, suggesting that surprise is not necessary for formation of enduring memories of significant events. Methodological advantages and disadvantages of studying early memories for public events are discussed. This study presents a new look at a very old problem in psychology, namely, relationship between age during early childhood when an event occurs and likelihood of its recall in adulthood. The study of early memories is often associated with an interest in psychoanalyti c theory. Indeed, common notion of psychoanalysis as a set of techniques for making repressed memories of childhood accessible to conscious recall attests to this linkage. Freud's statement of problem is quite clear. In his discussion of infantile sexuality, he noted the peculiar amnesia which, in case of most people, though by no means all, hides earliest beginnings of their childhood up to their sixth or eigth year (1905/1953, p. 174). The termchildhood amnesia (or infantile amnesia) remains as a description of this phenomenon. Still, it is necessary to point out that a number of 19th-century genetic psychologists predate Freud in their concern with probing early memories. Priority seems to belong to Gallon (1879), who at age 57 used method of word associations to activate his

CONSCIOUS AND PRECONSCIOUS INFLUENCES ON RECALL: ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE RESTRICTING EFFECTS OF AWARENESS.

CONSCIOUS AND PRECONSCIOUS INFLUENCES ON RECALL: ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE RESTRICTING EFFECTS OF AWARENESS.

Forgetting of Tachistoscopic Exposures as a Function of Repression

The Afenninger Foundation Despite considerable recent interest in Poeczl's method (Luborsky & Shevtin, 1956) for artificial induction of day residues, verification of his work is still incomplete. In his method, a picture is exposed at .01 sec.; S describes and draws what he can recall. The next day he brings in any dreams he had that night and these are found to contain unreported aspects of the picrure. Our recent replication (Shevrin & Luborsky, 1958) gave similar results, but did not provide convincing evidence that che dreams (and the waking images we added) recovered any material that was missed on the first day for dynamic reasons. What follows is a new analysis of the data of the 1958 experiment. We began by a review of che concept of repression and of how its various facets should appear in the and subsequent recovery of fleeting impressions chat take place in the Poetzl phenomenon. The conditions leading to repression include (1) the withholding or withdrawal of attencion from something. Withholding of attention refers co instances in which the person did not become aware of the scimulus at all. Withdrawal of accention refers co che forgetting of a stimulus of which he was initially aware. (2) The withholding or withdrawal may be prompted by the anxiecy that would have'been aroused had the percepts or memories been fully actended to. (3) The unattended to percepts or memories do not simply await the return of attencion in an unchanged state; they tend to become further drawn into the conscellacions of previously repressed memories. We distinguished two main groups of people among 26 Ss according to their pattern of conscious remembering: 12, who after a day's delay forgot some of these impressions (decreasers), and 9, who increased the recall of these impressions (increasers). Only items of information of whose presence they had been certain were included. If the decreasers were repressing, certain inferences about their performance should follow. By and large, these were confirmed. (a) The decreasers (as compared with increasers) recovered more aspects of the picture that had never appeared in conscious recall (an average of 4.4 recovered items vs. 1.8, t = 4.483, PI < .005). (b) They had dreams and images whose manifest content was rated as more filled with unpleasant and anxiecy arousing material (t = 3.077, PI < .005). Furthermore, the more