Verbal Recall Abilities Research Articles

EPELI: a novel virtual reality task for the assessment of goal-directed behavior in real-life contexts

A recently developed virtual reality task, EPELI (Executive Performance in Everyday LIving), quantifies goal-directed behavior in naturalistic conditions. Participants navigate a virtual apartment, performing household chores given by a virtual character. EPELI aims to tap attention, executive function, and prospective memory. To ensure its applicability to further research and clinical work and to study its relationship to relevant background factors, we examined several key properties of EPELI in 77 typically developing 9–13-year-old children. These included EPELI’s internal consistency, age and gender differences, sensitivity to gaming experience, head-mounted display (HMD) type, and verbal recall ability, as well as its relationships with parent-rated everyday executive problems. Of the eight EPELI measures, the following six showed acceptable internal consistency: task and navigation efficacy, number of correctly performed tasks and overall actions, time monitoring, and controller movement. Some measures were associated with age, gender, or verbal encoding ability. Moreover, EPELI performance was associated with parent-rated everyday executive problems. There were no significant associations of gaming background, task familiarity, or HMD type with the EPELI measures. These results attest to the reliability and ecological validity of this new virtual reality tool for the assessment of attention, executive functions, and prospective memory in children.

Hippocampal Functioning and Verbal Associative Memory in Adolescents with Congenital Hypothyroidism.

Thyroid hormone (TH) is essential for normal development of the hippocampus, which is critical for memory and particularly for learning and recalling associations between visual and verbal stimuli. Adolescents with congenital hypothyroidism (CH), who lack TH in late gestation and early life, demonstrate weak verbal recall abilities, reduced hippocampal volumes, and abnormal hippocampal functioning for visually associated material. However, it is not known if their hippocampus functions abnormally when remembering verbal associations. Our objective was to assess hippocampal functioning in CH using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Fourteen adolescents with CH and 14 typically developing controls (TDC) were studied. Participants studied pairs of words and then, during fMRI acquisition, made two types of recognition decisions: in one they judged whether the pairs were the same as when seen originally and in the other, whether individual words were seen before regardless of pairing. Hippocampal activation was greater for pairs than items in both groups, but this difference was only significant in TDC. When we directly compared the groups, the right anterior hippocampus was the primary region in which the TDC and CH groups differed for this pair memory effect. Results signify that adolescents with CH show abnormal hippocampal functioning during verbal memory processing.

A Review of the Verbal Memory Profile of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Behavioral studies concerning the memory of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have yielded inconsistent results over the past few decades. Some have found impairment where as others have reported an intact memory profile in ASD. Therefore, in the present review, we will examine the verbal memory profile of ASD. A systematic search has located 18 articles for review and analysis. It is suggested that ASDs mainly have an intact verbal recognition performance but impaired verbal recall ability. The conflicting memory performance found in ASD may probably be due to confounding factors, including differences in the experimental designs of research studies, the intellectual functioning levels of ASD and their developmental trajectories. In general, the memory processing of ASD is implicated by the frontal lobe function, and the memory problem is primarily caused by the poor utilization of organizational strategies during information encoding. A failure to encode the information properly will directly hinder their later retrieval performance. Finally, priorities for future research in the memory functions of ASD are suggested, and the need for more rigorous research paradigms is highlighted. With a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying mechanism of the memory functions of those with ASD, it is believed that better intervention programs can be developed to aid their memory deficits and to improve their daily-life performances.

Depressed Mood and Memory Impairment Before and After Unilateral Posteroventral Pallidotomy in Parkinson’s Disease

This study evaluated poor mood state as a moderator of changes in verbal recall ability from before to after unilateral posteroventral pallidotomy in 54 individuals with advanced Parkinson's disease. Repeated-measures analysis of covariance (controlling for motor disease severity) indicated that left-posteroventral pallidotomy subjects with depressed mood performed more poorly on measures of verbal list learning and story recall compared to nondepressed subjects or right-posteroventral pallidotomy subjects with depressed mood both before and after surgery. The results suggest that depressed mood should be taken into account when interpreting memory test performance in Parkinson's disease surgical candidates both before and after surgery.

Altered responsiveness during hyperventilation-induced EEG slowing: a non-epileptic phenomenon in normal children.

The relation between hyperventilation (HV)-induced high-amplitude rhythmical slowing (HIHARS) and altered responsiveness without generalized spike and wave activity has not been clearly defined. To test whether altered responsiveness is a nonspecific physiologic response rather than a symptom of generalized epilepsy, we assessed verbal recall ability and motor response testing in 12 healthy nonepileptic children (mean age 9.6 years). Both tasks were administered as a baseline before HV, during HV but before onset of EEG slowing, and during HIHARS. Verbal recall and motor responsiveness remained unchanged during baseline and HV before onset of slowing. During HIHARS, all children exhibited impaired verbal recall (p < 0.005) and 8 of 12 failed to respond to repeated auditory clicks (p < 0.005). Our findings indicate that in a normal setting, responsiveness may be impaired during HV in healthy nonepileptic children.

Disentangling Listening and Verbal Recall Related But Separate Constructs?

This study examines the relationship between verbal recall and listening, using measures of listening behavior as a criterion. Three possible models of the verbal recall-listening relationship are examined: isomorphic, confounding, and recall ability as antecedent to listening. Seventy-three participants were videotaped while interviewing a confederate, and the videotapes were coded for observable listening behaviors. Participants also completed a conversation-based listening test and a verbal recall test. The results indicated that, although related, listening and the ability to recall verbal stimuli are not isomorphic. The data were also inconsistent with a model specifying verbal recall ability as a confound of listening. A model stipulating verbal recall ability as antecedent to listening provided the best fit to the data. Implications of this model for past and future research are discussed.