Difficult Memory Research Articles

Shades of complicity: archives of the ‘implicated subject’

AbstractKnowledge of the Arandora Star is no longer limited to members of the UK's historic Italian community but is shared by a much larger constituency thanks to the greater accessibility of historical documents relating to the sinking of the ship, and to the substantial volume of new creative work inspired by it. This article examines this expansion of historical memory by following two discrete but entangled strands. The first follows the construction of the Arandora Star archive, starting from the author's chance personal encounter with a photograph. The second involves a close reading of Francine Stock's A Foreign Country (1999) and Caterina Soffici's Nessuno può fermarmi (2017), two novels that explore how people outside the historic Italian community recognise their implication in the sinking and its aftermath. Both foreground the intergenerational and transnational transmission of difficult memory and the ways in which the Arandora Star functions as an unstable point of historical knowledge and ethical judgement.

Bloody Christmas Eve in Ochotnica Dolna. Remembrance Practices of the Pacification of Ochotnica Dolna, Poland, on 23 December 1944 from an Anthropological Perspective

This paper concerns the contemporary practices held in the village of Ochotnica Dolna, Poland, to commemorate the pacification that took place on 23 December 1944. Both the accounts provided by the residents of the village and their practices of sharing the memory of the pacification with the next generation show the strong presence of contemporary imaginings of the Second World War. An interpretation of these imaginings from the perspective of memory studies and anthropology indicates the influence of images related to this dramatic event. The emotional load of some of these accounts and their threads lends itself to sharing and copying. The fluent boundaries between the witness accounts, historical and amateur analyses and the places of memory in Ochotnica Dolna create a complex and multithreaded set of imaginings of the past. At the same time, this difficult memory of the pacification is part of the village residents’ identity, as well as being part of the local concept of the “Little Motherland.”

Difficult Politics and Poetics: Encountering “Truth” and Violence in Peruvian and Colombian Sites of Memory

ABSTRACT Peru and Colombia are prominent cases within museological debates on memorializing conflict. Following extended armed conflicts and Peace Accords in the latter decades of the twentieth century (Peru: 1980–2000; Colombia 1964–2016), attention to the countries’ transitional justice periods and the creation of memory sites has been widespread. In this article, we focus on visits in 2017 and 2019 to the Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social in Lima and the Museo Casa de la Memoria in Medellín to engage debates in Latin American studies on the politics and poetics of museum memory work. By focusing on how “truth” and multiple violences are encountered via museological tools such as metaphors, journalistic reporting, and audiovisual affective encounters in the sites’ permanent exhibitions, we reveal the nuances and tensions of difficult memory work when continuing conflict and state denialist politics are at play.

Can personal task choice shield against fear and anger prime effects on effort? A study on cardiac response

This experiment tested whether personal task choice can shield against implicit affective influences on sympathetically mediated cardiovascular response, reflecting effort. Participants were N = 121 healthy university students who completed a moderately difficult memory task with integrated briefly flashed and masked fear vs. anger primes. Half of the participants believed they could choose between an attention and a memory task, while the other half was automatically assigned to the task. Replicating previous research, we expected an influence of the affect primes on effort when the task was externally assigned. By contrast, when participants were given a task choice, we predicted strong action shielding and thus a weak implicit affect effect on resource mobilization. As expected, participants in the assigned task condition showed stronger cardiac pre-ejection period reactivity when exposed to fear primes than when processing anger primes. Importantly, this affect prime effect disappeared when participants could ostensibly choose the task. These findings add to other recent evidence for action shielding by personal task choice and importantly extend this effect to implicit affective influences on cardiac reactivity during task performance.

‘Memories I want to remember, memories I want to forget’: Desire-centred Memory Work with Latin American Migrants in Australia

ABSTRACT Latin American migration to Australia spans over five decades. Despite growing Latin American diasporas in Australia, little is known in public imaginaries about the difficult histories, desires and struggles that have shaped those who fled their countries due to conflict and dictatorships. This article draws from fifteen in-depth interviews with Spanish-speaking migrants from post-conflict and dictatorial Latin America living in Australia. Engaging with decolonial knowledge and scholarship in Latin American memory studies, the article argues for desire-centred memory work in which trauma, damage and deficit narratives are decentred. Through theorising with ambiguity and participants’ voices, I reveal the potential of taking seriously everyday memories of joy, care, and desire to unsettle and nuance normative understandings of difficult histories, including Latin American migration to Australia. In doing so, I also emphasise the importance of engaging with people as epistemic subjects who are doing the difficult memory work by choosing how, when, and where to narrate and share their stories. Ultimately, this article contributes to decolonial, feminist and Southern epistemologies and understandings of memory in the wake of violence that are desire-based (Tuck, E., 2009. Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79 (3), 409–427) and transformative.

The Memory of the Repressed: Online Ritual of Commemoration “Return of Names”

In this article, we will consider the formal and semantic extension of the action-ritual of commemoration of the repressed “Return of the Names”, as well as the emotional characterization of participation. The memory of repressions is a difficult memory, that is more likely to be maintained “from below” — relatively low-resource actors. In this context, the Internet seems to be a promising platform for broadcasting such memory. We will consider the performativity of the ritual of commemoration, that is, the broadening of its forms and meanings by the participants. We reconstruct how they participate in remembrance and express their political and civic position regarding human rights, past and present repressions, and the state. We will turn to emotive markers (affect, emotions, evaluations) as a spectrum, thus seeing how language is able to express feelings about a difficult past, which is problematic to talk about. We will come to the conclusion that the conversation about the difficult past within the framework of the ritual of commemoration occurs to a greater extent through the use of value judgments than affect or even emotions, which means that the ways of talking about the difficult past are largely formed, although the language, discourse does not exhaust the fullness of participants` experiences.

INSIGHTS INTO HEALTH-RELEVANT INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS IN AGING COUPLES FROM THE LAB AND DAILY LIFE

Abstract Emerging research demonstrates that long-term and daily health indicators are closely linked in aging partners. Yet, not much is known about exactly how partners get under each other’s skin. This symposium investigates different positive and negative interpersonal contexts, including physical intimacy, positive and negative emotional experiences, and couple conversations (e.g., conflict, recounting distressing memories, discussing enjoyable topics), and their link with neuroendocrine and cardiovascular markers. The four talks feature a variety of study designs ranging from laboratory research to ambulatory assessment methods which recruited couples in midlife and old age. Kolodziejczak et al. use ambulatory assessment data to examine links between (experienced and wished for) physical intimacy, affect, and cortisol in older couples. Pauly et al. pool data from three ambulatory assessment aging studies to analyze how own and partner positive and negative affective states are intertwined with everyday cortisol secretion in old age. Wilson et al. invited middle-aged to older couples to engage in two different conversations (recounting a difficult memory, conflict) and investigated concurrent changes in affect and cardiovascular activity. Meier and colleagues make use of automated language analysis to examine how positive and negative emotion word use during a positive and negative conversation in the laboratory relates to cardiovascular reactivity in middle-aged couples. The discussion by Christina Röcke will delineate insights gained from these four papers, discuss their strengths and limitations, and outline directions for future inquiry.

The age-related effect on electrophysiological correlates of successful episodic memory encoding supports the hypothesis of a deficit in self-initiated encoding processes in aging

Episodic memory decline with aging may be due to an age-related deficit in encoding processing, older adults having increasing difficulty to self-initiate encoding strategies that support later retrieval. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study explored for the first time the neural correlates of successful encoding in a resource-dependent episodic memory task, in which participants had to self-initiate processes at both encoding and retrieval. At the behavioral level, results confirm the better memory performance of young than older adults. Comparing the neural activity elicited by studied items that were and were not subsequently recalled (Subsequent Memory Effect, SME), electrophysiological data revealed that younger adults showed a significant and sustained SME, shifting from parietal to frontal areas, suggesting that they self-initiated deep encoding strategies. In older adults, the duration of brain activity was shorter and located more in the parietal than frontal areas, suggesting that they used shallow rather than deep processes. Consistent with the hypothesis of a deficit in self-initiated strategies in aging, our findings suggest that when older adults are faced with a difficult memory task (no encoding support and no cue at retrieval), they engage fewer elaborative strategies than young adults, resulting in impaired episodic memory performance.

Innovations in Primary Education: Neuropsychological Aspect

The article is devoted to the influence of neuropsychology on the modern student. The concepts of "neuropsychology" and "neuropsychological research", research and publications of domestic and foreign scientists on the development of neuropsychology and the use of methods that improve the work of the right and left hemispheres of the brain are considered in the article. The scientific potential of neuropsychology is indicated. Attention is drawn to the views of scientists who studied the neuropsychology of childhood. It has been found that there are many more books and periodicals in foreign literature that contain information on neuropsychology. A foreign project aimed at studying the brain is covered. It is emphasized that in modern educational institutions in Spain, teachers pay special attention to the neuropsychological characteristics of each child. Emphasis is placed on the difficulties of primary school children who need neuropsychological care. The focus is on the features of functional blocks of the brain and their mutual development. Emphasis is placed on the need to use health-preserving and play technologies in the organization of the educational process for teachers working on the Concept of the "New Ukrainian School". The effectiveness of kinesiological exercises for brain function, which contribute to the harmonious development of personality, has been proven. The significance of moving activities for the body of a child of primary school age is revealed. The powerful influence of means of musical and fine arts which help to develop visual perception, difficult spatial abilities, visual attention, memory, verbal and visual-motor skills on overcoming of neuropsychological frustration is proved. A block of neuropsychological exercises to activate the brain is presented. Samples of corrective exercises are highlighted: breathing exercises, massage, oculomotor exercises.

Longitudinal analysis of sustained performance on gamified cognitive assessment tasks

Serious games aim to provide cognitive assessments that are more enjoyable and easier to self-administer, potentially leading to more frequent assessments. We carried out two studies examining the relationship between game-playing enjoyment, game difficulty, and cognitive (game) performance. In the first study, 16 participants played three serious games once a week over four weeks as part of an undergraduate course, but with relatively minor motivation in terms of course credits. In the second study, 14 participants played serious games over six sessions in a period of three weeks. Participants included graduate students receiving credit for the course project (a major component of the grade) and friends and family that they recruited. Performance in the more difficult tasks tended to improve over time in the second study, but not in the first. Participants from the first study showed an overall negative sentiment toward the games. However, participants from the second study enjoyed the majority of games except for the more difficult games that required players to temporarily hold and memorize information. Participants got significantly better in the more difficult working memory games, even though these games were less popular than the simpler games. Our interpretation of the results is that enjoyability is important in encouraging people to keep playing cognitive assessment games as time progresses, and that enjoyability helps in maintaining performance in easy games. Higher motivation on the other hand played a significant role in facilitating learning effects in difficult games as well as in maintaining enjoyability.

Personality traits affect older adults' memory differently depending on the environmental support provided at encoding

Research suggests that personality traits are associated with memory performance, particularly as people age. In two studies, we examined two personality traits (openness to experience and neuroticism) that have been hypothesized to modulate episodic memory performance in older adults. We tested the hypothesis that these traits would be differently associated with episodic memory according to the amount of cognitive support provided at encoding. We examined the role of these personality traits in free recall when performance was supported by prior task success versus no prior task success (Experiment 1) and by generating versus reading (Experiment 2). Results showed that prior task success and generating items led to superior memory performance. In both studies, openness to experience was positively associated with memory performance and neuroticism was negatively associated with memory performance. Further, openness accounted for the most variability in recall performance under conditions providing low cognitive support and neuroticism, on the other hand, accounted for recall in both high and low support conditions. Results suggest that neuroticism is a key personality trait implicated in memory performance, but for the most difficult memory tasks, a high level in openness may aid memory performance.

Shared cognitive resources between memory and attention during sound-sequence encoding.

You are on the phone, walking down a street. This daily situation calls for selective attention, allowing you to ignore surrounding irrelevant sounds, while trying to encode in memory the relevant information from the phone. Attention and memory are indeed two cognitive functions that are interacting constantly. However, their interaction is not yet well characterized during sound-sequence encoding. We independently manipulated both selective attention and working memory in a delayed-matching-to-sample of two tone-series, played successively in one ear. During the first melody presentation (memory encoding), weakly or highly distracting melodies were played in the other ear. Detection of the difference between the two comparison melodies could be easy or difficult, requiring low- or high-precision encoding, i.e., low or high memory load. Sixteen non-musician and 16 musician participants performed this new task. As expected, both groups of participants were less accurate in the difficult memory task and in difficult-to-ignore distractor conditions. Importantly, an interaction between memory-task difficulty and distractor difficulty was found in both groups. Non-musicians presented less difference between easy and difficult-to-ignore distractors in the difficult than in the easy memory task. On the contrary, musicians, with better performance than non-musicians, showed a greater difference between easy and difficult-to-ignore distractors in the difficult than in the easy memory task. In a second experiment including trials without a distractor, we could show that these effects are in line with the cognitive load theory. Taken together, these results speak for shared cognitive resources between working memory and attention during sound-sequence encoding.

Episodic memory and ageing: the role of cognitive reserve factors and cognitive resources according to task difficulty.

Episodic memory is the memory system which is most affected by ageing. However, similar memory decline is not seen in all older adults. Various cognitive reserve factors, such as the Openness Personality Trait and level of educational attainment, and cognitive resources linked to these factors, such as executive control and crystallised knowledge, can predict older adults' memory performance. This study examined the link between and the role of these variables in older adults' memory performances according to the difficulty of the task. Forty participants (aged between 60 and 82) learned 24 paired words with two encoding conditions (reading and generation), and then performed a cued recall. They were asked for their level of educational attainment, and their openness, executive control and crystallised knowledge levels were respectively measured using a personality questionnaire (Big Five), an inhibition test (Stroop) and a vocabulary test (Mill Hill). Only crystallised knowledge predicts older adults' recall of generated words while openness and executive control predict and mediate the effect of level of education on older adults' recall of read words. Openness is a reserve factor and is an essential component, along with executive control, in difficult memory tasks.

The Crisis of Brexit and Other Socio-Cultural Aspects of Silencing the Past through the Example of Anna Burns’ Milkman

The present article scrutinizes the phenomenon of a systemic silencing of the past visible in recent socio-political challenges caused by Brexit, especially in the case of the Irish border. Due to the comparative character of the paper, the attention is targeted at a symptomatic amnesia manifested on the British and Northern Irish sides. Postcolonial melancholia, to use Paul Gilroy’s term, facilitated by a systemic whitewashing of British imperial past, is contrasted here with Northern Irish postcolonial amnesia understood as a personal and institutionalised suppression of the difficult memory of colonisation and violence. In what follows, the paper aims to show how these two phenomena meet in the conflict of Brexit and how literature comments on the current political, social and cultural issues such as Brexit based on the example of Anna Burns’ novel Milkman (2018). The article discusses the silence which has surrounded the issue of the Irish Border in Brexit debates, as well as looks at the Northern Irish reluctance to talk about their past as an unsuccessful attempt to escape the demons of the past.

Depth of the field. Bystanders’ art, forensic art practice and non-sites of memory

Abandoned sites of trauma often become objects of art-based research. The forensic turn offered artists the requisite tools to approach uncommemorated post-violence sites to interact with their human and non-human actors. The usage of artistic methods allows us to inspect nondiscursive archives and retrieve information otherwise unavailable. The new wave of “forensic art” joins the efforts of post-war artists to respond to sites of mass killings. In the post-war era, sites of trauma were presented as (implicated) landscapes, or unhospitable terrains. The tendency to narrow space to the site and to contract the perspective is continued today by visual artists entering difficult memory grounds, looking down, inspecting the ground with a “forensic gaze”. A set of examples of such artistic endeavors, following the research project Uncommemorated Genocide Sites and Their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland (2016–2020) is discussed as “bystanders’ art.”

Motivated but not engaged: The implicit achievement motive requires difficult or unclear task difficulty conditions to exert an impact on effort

Integrating the achievement motive literature and motivational intensity theory, we expected the implicit achievement motive (nAch) to directly determine effort mobilization when task difficulty is unclear. However, nAch should interact with task difficulty in determining effort mobilization when task difficulty is clear. Participants worked on an easy versus difficult memory task (Study 1) or a clear versus unclear arithmetic task (Study 2). We used the Picture-Story-Exercise to assess nAch and pre-ejection period (PEP) to operationalize effort. As predicted, PEP reactivity was strong in the difficult-high-nAch condition and in the unclear-high-nAch condition but low in the other three conditions. Supporting motivational intensity theory, our results showed that nAch requires difficult or unclear task conditions to exert a noticeable impact on effort.

„Die Sprache hat also ihren Ort.“ Zur Mehrsprachigkeit von Maja Haderlaps Roman Engel des Vergessens

“Die Sprache hat also ihren Ort.” On Multilingualism in Maja Haderlap’s Novel Engel des Vergessens. Based on philological research on multilingualism and with regard to Maja Haderlap’s literary work in general this article deals with the specific form of multilingualism that can be observed in her novel Engel des Vergessens (2011). Maja Haderlap, born 1961 in Bad Eisenkappel/Železna Kapla, Carinthia (region in southern Austria), grew up with two languages, Slovenian and German. The authors of the article pursue the question to what degree her literary work and especially her novel can be characterised as multilingual and what kind of poetic multilingualism can be found there. They focus on the novel’s narrative and on the use of language(s), with a short historical excursus on the Slovenian minority in Carinthia as well as the difficult memory politics in Austria. Maja Haderlap not only writes about the territorial and historical preconditions of multilingualism in Carinthia but also inscribes these conditions in the text itself, characterising both the narrative and the language. Although the novel is the result of a shift from Slovenian to German, its multilingualism can be analysed on different levels: on the level of the relationship between discours and histoire – to refer to Genette’s narratological terms –, on the level of cultural codes of the Slovenian language within the novel’s German text, and in general with regard to the fact, that the text is written with the modes of expression of Slovenian and German or with the help of the ‘no man’s land’ between the languages. One can therefore – with respect to the terms of philological research – find both obvious and latent multilingualism and, thirdly, one can observe Mehr-Sprachlichkeit, a term that has been defined by Silke Pasewalck in previous articles.

Episodic memory and aging: The role of cognitive reserve and cognitive resources according to task difficulty

Episodic memory is the most affected memory system in aging. However, memory decline is not similar in every older adult. Various cognitive reserve factors, as Openness personality trait or educational level, and cognitive resources linked to these factors, as executive control and crystallized knowledge, can predict older adults' memory performance. This study examined the link between and the role of these variables in older adults' memory performances according to the task difficulty. Forty participants (60-82years old) learned 24paired words with two encoding conditions (reading and generation) and then performed a cued recall. Their educational level was asked, and their Openness, executive control and crystallized knowledge levels were respectively measured using a personality questionnaire (Big Five), an inhibition test (Stroop) and a vocabulary test (Mill Hill). Only crystallized knowledge predicts older adults' generated words recall while Openness and executive control predict and mediate educational level effect on older adults' read words recall. Openness is a reserve factor and is an essential component, along with executive control, in difficult memory tasks.

Can muted video advertising be as effective as video advertising with sound?

Video ads are often muted when seen in social media on a smartphone. This research compared video ads across three Muting conditions: (1) normal (audio), (2) muted, and (3) muted with subtitles. The lab-study results showed that muted ads had lower free brand recall, cued brand recall, and brand recognition than normal ads and adding subtitles did not improve effectiveness on these measures. However, the free brand recall effects were significant only for ads seen in a news environment on a desktop computer. Ads seen in a social media environment on a mobile phone were less effective, measured by free brand recall, which is a difficult memory task. Muted ads were just as effective as normal ads and subtitled ads, in a mobile social media environment, on every measure except brand recognition, which is an easy memory task. These results suggest that muting makes little difference to the effectiveness of video ads seen in social media on smartphones. In the desktop news environment, muting reduced ad effectiveness, measured by free brand recall, but improved ad liking. The negative effect of muting on free brand recall was significant only for ads with high amounts of information (speech and audio branding) in their soundtracks, which was lost when the ad was muted. Two visual strategies (visual storytelling, and referencing shared understandings) counteracted the effects of muting on high audio information ads seen in a desktop news environment.

Through the eyes of the Potala Palace: Difficult heritage and memory in Tibet

The Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet serves as an important religious symbol and an embodiment of Tibetan culture. Ever since Chinese troops invaded Tibet in the 1950s, the Chinese government has attempted to control Tibet, including converting the Potala Palace and its rich material culture into a secular institution on display for tourists. Now void of the Dalai Lama and most of its contents, the Potala has become a façade for public consumption of Chinese state-led narratives and a symbol of cultural oppression. Through their approaches to heritage management and tourism, and with the aid of the Potala’s listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site, China is capitalizing on Tibet’s cultural heritage, undermining the Tibetan people and their culture, and controlling the narrative of Tibetan history to alter the collective memory of Tibetans.