Patrick S R Davidson

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Verified

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• Professor at University of Ottawa

Objective: Emotional events and stimuli typically are remembered better than neutral ones, but this has rarely been examined carefully with naturalistic video clips. Here, we asked how memory for video clips may be related to their emotional valence (i.e., negative, positive, or neutral) across four online studies. Method: In Study 1, undergraduate...

Two effects on memory have been described in the literature: the emotional enhancement of memory (EEM) (i.e., an emotional stimulus is better remembered than a neutral stimulus) and the dynamic superiority effect (DSE) (i.e., a moving visual stimulus is better remembered than a static stimulus). However, the DSE has previously only been studied usi...

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) involves a decline in episodic memory and, in many cases, language. Taler et al. (2021) developed a set of story recall materials that we expected to be sensitive to changes in language in normal aging and MCI. Here, we examined the lexical (word-level) contents of participants' story recall responses from Taler et a...

The Multifactorial Memory Questionnaire (MMQ; Troyer & Rich, [2002]. Psychometric properties of a new metamemory questionnaire for older adults. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 57(1), P19–P27) is a widely used measure of subjective memory consisting of three scales: Satisfaction, Ability, and Strate...

Recent cognitive neuroscience research has uncovered some similarities and some differences between General semantic memory (e.g., knowledge about family in general) and Personal semantic memory (PS; e.g., knowledge about my family). To better understand the representational content and cognitive processes of PS and their relation to general semant...

Objectives Determine whether levels of anxiety and depression, cognitive ability, and self-quarantining during and prior to the pandemic predict decreases in perceived functional ability. Design and Setting Longitudinal data collected from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) COVID-19 Questionnaire Study (2020) and core CLSA study (Foll...

One of the most common distinctions in long-term memory is that between semantic (i.e., general world knowledge) and episodic (i.e., recollection of contextually specific events from one’s past). However, emerging cognitive neuroscience data suggest a surprisingly large overlap between the neural correlates of semantic and episodic memory. Moreover...

Objectives: Older adults often have difficulty remembering the details of recently encountered objects. We (Davidson et al., 2019) found this with the Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST). Surprisingly, the older adults' MST lure discrimination index (LDI) was significantly correlated with visual acuity but not with memory or executive function. Here we...

Background Older adults have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and related preventative measures undertaken during the pandemic. Given clear evidence of the relationship between loneliness and health outcomes, it is imperative to better understand if, and how, loneliness has changed for older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic, and whom...

As the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic prolongs, documenting trajectories of the socioeconomic gradient of mental health is important. We describe changes in the prevalence and absolute and relative income-related inequalities of mental health between April and December 2020 in Canada. We used data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Ag...

Background: Symptom persistence in non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients, also known as Long COVID or Post-acute Sequelae of COVID-19, is not well characterized or understood, and few studies have included non-COVID-19 control groups. Methods: We used data from a cross-sectional COVID-19 questionnaire (September-December 2020) linked to baseline (2...

Background People with obesity are at increased risk of chronic stress, and this may have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adverse childhood experiences (ACE) are also associated with both obesity and stress, and may modify risk of stress among people with obesity. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the associations between...

Oral contraceptives (OCs) are one of the most common forms of hormonal birth control. A small literature has suggested that OC use may affect visuospatial ability, episodic memory, and executive control. However, the literature has been criticized for small sample sizes and the use of different, single cognitive tests in each study. We investigated...

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) involves declines in language and episodic memory. Episodic memory is often assessed using language tasks. To prevent linguistic factors from confounding recall scores, memory and language should be jointly examined. We explored linguistic patterns on a story recall task among cognitively healthy adults aged 65+ (n=1...

Background frailty imparts a higher risk for hospitalisation, mortality and morbidity due to COVID-19 infection, but the broader impacts of the pandemic and associated public health measures on community-living people with frailty are less known. Methods we used cross-sectional data from 23,974 Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging participants who...

Background The Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has created a spectrum of adversities that have affected older adults disproportionately. This paper examines older adults with multimorbidity using longitudinal data to ascertain why some of these vulnerable individuals coped with pandemic-induced risk and stressors better than others – t...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted access to healthcare services in Canada. Research prior to the pandemic has found that depression and anxiety symptoms were associated with increased unmet healthcare needs. The primary objective of this study was to examine if mental health was associated with perceived access to healthcare during the p...

Older adults tend to be in a more positive mood than young adults, and tend to remember positive information more often than negative information, yet the link between their positive mood and their positive memory bias has not often been explored. In this study, we manipulated young and older adults’ moods prior to their completing an emotional mem...

Episodic memory is vulnerable to aging and may be influenced by age-related decline in the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. We probed this relation using a novel, minimally invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation marker of brain acetylcholine: short-latency afferent inhibition (SAI). We used neuropsychological testing to construct a composite sco...

Social network size has been associated with complex socio-cognitive processes (e.g., memory, perspective taking). Supporting this idea, recent neuroimaging studies in healthy adults have reported a relationship between social network size and brain volumes in regions related to memory and social cognition (e.g., hippocampus, amygdala). Lesion-defi...

Executive function and episodic memory processes are particularly vulnerable to aging. We sought to learn the degree to which sex, mood, and subjective sleep quality might be related to executive function and episodic memory composite scores in community-dwelling older adults. We replicated Glisky and colleagues’ two-factor (i.e., executive functio...

Objectives Studies on informal caregiving during the COVID-19 pandemic have mainly focused on sub-groups of caregivers using cross-sectional or convenience samples, limiting the generalizability of findings. Conversely, this longitudinal study examines the effects of the pandemic and caregiving factors on depressive symptoms and anxiety over nine m...

One of the most common distinctions in long-term memory is that between semantic (i.e., one’s general knowledge of the world) and episodic (i.e., recollection of contextually-specific events from one’s personal past). However, emerging cognitive neuroscience data suggest a surprisingly large overlap between the neural correlates of semantic and epi...

Importance The association of COVID-19 not requiring hospitalization with functional mobility in community-dwelling adults above and beyond the impact of the pandemic control measures implemented in 2020 remains to be elucidated. Objective To evaluate the association between a COVID-19 diagnosis and change in mobility and physical function of adul...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, with over 233 million confirmed cases and over 4.6 million deaths globally as of September 20211. Although many studies have reported worse mental health outcomes during the early weeks of the pandemic, some sources suggest a gradual decrease in a...

Self-knowledge is a type of personal semantic knowledge that concerns one’s self-image and personal identity. It has most often been operationalized as the summary of one’s personality traits (“I am a stubborn person”). Interestingly, recent studies have revealed that the neural correlates of self-knowledge can be dissociated from those of general...

Digital technology is becoming increasingly prevalent in cognitive research and clinical applications for older adults. Innovations in web-based cognitive testing, digital tracking tools, and brain–computer interfaces show promise. Digital technology offers potentially safer, more effective, and less costly alternatives to pharmacological and behav...

Recall of story materials is a primary way to assess episodic memory. However, the standard scoring method may not be maximally sensitive to cognitive decline. We developed a set of 24 stories, and younger and older adults heard these stories and recalled them immediately and after a delay (Study 1). Twelve of these stories were then selected, and...

Computerized cognitive training programs are becoming increasingly popular and practical for cognitive aging. Nevertheless, basic questions remain about the benefits of such programs, and about the degree to which participant expectations might influence training and transfer. Here we examined a commercial cognitive training program (Activate) in a...

Knowledge about the future self may engage cognitive processes typically ascribed to episodic memory, such as awareness of the future self as an extension of the current self (i.e., autonoetic consciousness) and the construction of future events. In a prior study (Tanguay et al., 2018), temporal orientation influenced the Late Positive Component (L...

We present a collection of emotional video clips that can be used in ways similar to static images (e.g., the International Affective Picture System, IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008). The Database of Emotional Videos from Ottawa (DEVO) includes 291 brief video clips (mean duration = 5.42 s; SD = 2.89 s; range = 3–15 s) extracted from obscure...

The effects of aging on cognition are not uniform. Rather, certain aspects of attention and memory are adversely affected by aging, whereas other cognitive domains are relatively preserved, and others even show positive age-related changes. Several cognitive theories have been advanced to explain these aging-related patterns, but none has yet preva...

Emotional stimuli are often more semantically interrelated and relatively distinct than neutral stimuli. These factors can enhance memory for emotional stimuli in young adults, but their effects in older adults—and on the age-related positive memory bias—remain unknown. In the present article, we tested whether item relatedness and distinctiveness...

Computerized cognitive training programs are becoming increasingly popular and practical for cognitive aging. Nevertheless, basic questions remain about the benefits of such programs, and about the degree to which participant expectations might influence training and transfer. Here we examined a commercial cognitive training program (Activate) in a...

Background: Despite a growing literature and commercial market, the effectiveness of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) remains questionable. Notably, studies rarely examine factors such as expectations of outcomes, which may influence tDCS response through placebo-like effects. Here we sought to determine whether expectations could inf...

Objectives: Pattern separation in memory encoding entails creating and storing distinct, detailed representations to facilitate storage and retrieval. The Mnemonic Similarity Test (Stark, Yassa, Lacy, & Stark, 2013) has been used to argue that normal aging leads to pattern separation decline. We sought to replicate previous reports of age-related...

Background: Typically, positive and negative emotional items are easier to remember than neutral ones. Charles, Mather, and Carstensen (2003) reported that older adults preferentially remember positive items, but this age-related “positivity effect” has not been replicated consistently. Methods: We conducted a close replication of Charles et al.’s...

Interventions aiming to enhance cognitive functions (e.g., computerized cognitive training and non-invasive brain stimulation) are increasingly widespread for the treatment and prevention of cognitive decline. Drawing on the allure of neuroplasticity, such programs comprise a multi-billion dollar industry catering to researchers, clinicians, and in...

Growing interest surrounds transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a safe and inexpensive method for improving cognitive functions and mood. Nevertheless, tDCS studies rarely examine psychological factors such as expectations of outcomes, which may influence tDCS responsiveness through placebo-like effects. Here we sought to evaluate the...

Studies have shown that cognitive functions decline with increasing age. As the population of older adults (OA) has grown, interest in cognitive training programs (CTP) has steadily expanded. The present study investigated whether CTP can lead to improvements in the performance of OA on cognitive tasks. Thirty-five adults (OA; 60-87 years) were rec...

Enhancing cognitive function through mentally challenging exercises (“brain training”) or non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) is an enticing yet controversial prospect. Although use of these methods is increasing rapidly, their effectiveness remains questionable. Notably, cognitive enhancement studies have typically failed to consider participant...

People underestimate how much their preferences will change in the future, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as a "presentism bias." Recently, we found that this presentism bias is attenuated when thinking about the preferences of other people. The aim of this study was to investigate whether predicting future preferences also differs depending on...

Self-knowledge concerns one's own preferences and personality. It pertains to the self (similar to episodic memory), yet does not concern events. It is factual (like semantic memory), but also idiosyncratic. For these reasons, it is unclear where self-knowledge might fall on a continuum in relation to semantic and episodic memory. In this study, we...

This chapter reviews some key aspects of the relationship between emotion and episodic memory, focusing on the cognitive and neural systems that underlie the relationship. We differentiate between effects of emotion on early and late long-term memory, review evidence for the selectivity of these effects, and discuss existing models that best accoun...

Primary objective: Repetition-lag memory training was developed to increase individuals’ use of recollection as opposed to familiarity in recognition memory. The goals of this study were to examine the feasibility of repetition-lag training in patients with chronic stroke and to explore whether the training might show suggestions of transfer to non...

Primary objective: Repetition-lag memory training was developed to increase individuals' use of recollection as opposed to familiarity in recognition memory. The goals of this study were to examine the feasibility of repetition-lag training in patients with chronic stroke and to explore whether the training might show suggestions of transfer to no...

RÉSUMÉ La détérioration du système cholinergique lors du vieillissement normal semble contribuer au déclin de l’attention avec l’âge. Nous avons examiné l’effet potentiel de l’âge sur la performance au « Attention Network Test » (ANT) ainsi que sur la variabilité intra-individuelle dans la vitesse des réponses à une tâche go/no-go et à une tâche de...

It has previously been reported that priming a collectivistic social orientation (compared with an individualistic one) boosts object-location memory (Kühnen & Oyserman, 2002; Oyserman, Sorensen, Reber, & Chen, 2009). We conducted 4 experiments to replicate this reported effect, using the same methods as in those initial reports. In Experiment 1 (n...

Poster presented at the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition Bi-annual Meeting.

It has been argued that adults underestimate the extent to which their preferences will change over time. We sought to determine whether such mispredictions are the result of a difficulty imagining that one's own current and future preferences may differ or whether it also characterizes our predictions about the future preferences of others. We use...

A common assertion is that semantic memory emerges from episodic memory, shedding the distinctive contexts associated with episodes over time and/or repeated instances. Some semantic concepts, however, may retain their episodic origins or acquire episodic information during life experiences. The current study examined this hypothesis by investigati...

Normal aging holds negative consequences for memory, in particular for the ability to recollect the precise details of an experience. With this in mind, Jennings and Jacoby (2003) developed a recollection training method using a single-probe recognition memory paradigm in which new items (i.e., foils) were repeated during the test phase at increasi...

Acquired brain injury (ABI) often compromises the ability to carry out instrumental activities of daily living such as cooking. ABI patients’ difficulties with executive functions and memory result in less independent and efficient meal preparation. Accurately assessing safety and proficiency in cooking is essential for successful community reinteg...

Cortical plasticity, including long-term potentiation (LTP)-like plasticity, can be assessed non-invasively with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) protocols. In this study, we examined age differences in responses to intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) in a group of 20 young and 18 healthy older adults. Because the choline...

Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) affects emotional evaluation, but less is known regarding the patients' ability to remember emotional stimuli. Here, bvFTD patients and age-matched controls studied positive, negative, and neutral pictures followed by a recognition memory test. Compared to controls, bvFTD patients showed a reductio...

Whereas source memory involves remembering from whom you have heard something, destination memory involves remembering to whom you have told something. Despite its practical relevance, destination memory has been studied little. Recently, two reports suggested that generally destination memory should be poorer than source memory, and that it should...

ABSTRACT Merely observing another person performing an action can make young people later misremember having performed this action themselves (the observation-inflation effect). We examined this type of memory error in healthy older adults. Overall, both young and older adult groups showed robust observation inflation. Although the number of people...

Primary objective: To use errorless learning to train a memory- and initiation-impaired woman on two activities of daily living routines and then to transfer these routines to a new home. Research design: Single case quasi-experimental. Methods and procedures: Over 9 months, a young woman with an anterior cerebral haemorrhagic stroke (secondar...

Individuals with a repressive coping style self-report low anxiety, but show high defensiveness and high physiological arousal. Repressors have impoverished negative autobiographical memories and are better able to suppress memory for negatively valenced and self-related laboratory materials when asked to do so. Research on spontaneous forgetting o...

New editions of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence and Memory scales are now available. Yet, given the significant changes in these new releases and the skepticism that has met them, independent evidence on their psychometric properties is much needed but currently lacking. We administered the WAIS-IV and the Older Adult version of the WMS-IV to 145 o...

Several theorists have described memory in Parkinson's disease (PD) as involving an amplification of the deficits seen in normal aging, and drawn parallels between PD and frontal lesion patients. Both normal aging and frontal lobe damage impair memory for the context in which one has encountered information (i.e., source memory). We thus sought to...

Memory may be crucial for establishing and/or maintaining social bonds. Using the National Social life, Health, and Aging Project questionnaire, we examined close interpersonal relationships in three amnesic people: K.C. and D.A. (who are adult-onset cases) and H.C. (who has developmental amnesia). All three patients were less involved than demogra...

Declarative memory is usually described as consisting of two systems: semantic and episodic memory. Between these two poles, however, may lie a third entity: personal semantics (PS). PS concerns knowledge of one's past. Although typically assumed to be an aspect of semantic memory, it is essentially absent from existing models of knowledge. Further...

The deterioration of the central cholinergic system in aging is hypothesized to underlie declines in several cognitive domains, including memory and executive functions. However, there is surprisingly little direct evidence regarding acetylcholine's specific role(s) in normal human cognitive aging. We used short-latency afferent inhibition (SAI) wi...

Medial-temporal, parietal, and pFC regions have been implicated in recollection and familiarity, but existing evidence from neuroimaging and patient studies is limited and conflicting regarding the role of specific regions within pFC in these memory processes. We report a study of 20 patients who had undergone resection of right frontal lobe tumors...

Changes in motor cortical excitability were examined in 2 groups of participants, young (18-30 years of age, n = 25) and senior (65-82 years of age, n = 31), using paired-pulse afferent stimulation with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) elicited by TMS at suprathreshold intensity (120% motor threshold) were fir...

Objective: The seminal paper on cerebellar cognitive affective syndrome by Schmahmann and Sherman (1998), and subsequent studies, has expanded our understanding of the role of the cerebellum beyond motor functioning to psychological and cognitive functioning. However, many of these studies have examined patients between 1 week and 5 years post-inju...

Physical exercise and fitness have been proposed as potential factors that promote healthy cognitive aging. Support for this hypothesis has come from cross sectional, longitudinal, and intervention studies. In the present review, we discuss several methodological problems that limit the conclusions of many studies. The lack of consensus on how to r...

The effects of aging on cognition are not uniform. Rather, certain aspects of attention and memory are adversely affected by aging, whereas other cognitive domains are relatively unaffected, and some others even show positive age-related changes. Several overlapping cognitive theories have been advanced to explain these aging-related patterns, but...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with episodic memory deficits, but their exact nature is unclear. Some dual-process studies have suggested that recollection is impaired and familiarity is spared in PD, yet others have found the opposite. Our goal was to investigate these memory processes in PD and determine whether the inconsistency among ex...

Imagining performing an action can induce false memories of having actually performed it-this is referred to as the imagination-inflation effect. Drawing on research suggesting that action observation-like imagination-involves action simulation, and thus creates matching motor representations in observers, we examined whether false memories of self...

The recent surge in event-related fMRI studies of episodic memory has generated a wealth of information about the neural correlates of encoding and retrieval processes. However, interpretation of individual studies is hampered by methodological differences, and by the fact that sample sizes are typically small. We submitted results from studies of...

Flashbulb memories (FMs) are vivid, long-lasting memories for the circumstances in which people hear about shocking news events (e.g., the Kennedy assassination). Here I review current work on the cognitive and neural bases of FMs, focusing first on what exactly FMs constitute, and whether one's intuitive sense that they are more accurate and more...

Transitive inference has traditionally been regarded as a relational proposition-based reasoning task, however, recent investigations question the validity of this assumption. Although some results support the use of a relational proposition-based approach, other studies find evidence for the use of associative learning. We examined whether partici...

Although neuroimaging and human lesion studies agree that the medial parietal region plays a critical role in episodic memory, many neuroimaging studies have also implicated lateral parietal cortex, leading some researchers to suggest that the lateral region plays a heretofore underappreciated role in episodic memory. Because there are very few ext...

Three commonly used clinical tests of frontal-executive function are verbal fluency, the Trail Making Test, and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, but few lesion studies of regional specificity within the frontal lobe (FL) exist for them. We examined 20 patients with right FL tumor resection, and mapped their damage to explore brain-behavior relation...

Emotional experiences are easier to remember than neutral ones, but whether memory for all aspects of an experience is improved by emotion remains unclear. Some researchers have argued that the influence of emotion on memory is different for item than for source information, whereas others have argued that emotion affects both similarly. Also, whet...

Current theories postulate that recognition memory can be supported by two independent processes: recollection (i.e. vivid memory for an item and the contextual details surrounding it) versus familiarity (i.e. the mere sense that an item is old). There is conflicting evidence on whether recognition memory is impaired in Parkinson's disease, perhaps...

Flashbulb memories (FMs) are vivid, long-lasting memories for the source of surprising, arousing news. Laboratory studies have consistently found that older adults, especially those with below-average frontal lobe (FL) function, are impaired in source memory relative to young. We tested memory for the source of news concerning the September 11th te...

The role of the human frontal lobes in episodic memory is becoming better understood, thanks mainly to focal lesion and neuroimaging studies. Here we review some recent findings from basic research on the frontal lobes in memory encoding, search, and decision-making at retrieval. For each of these processes, researchers have uncovered cases in whic...

A flashbulb memory (FM) is a vivid, enduring memory for how one learned about a surprising, shocking event. It thus involves memory for the source of event information, as opposed to memory for the event itself. Which brain regions are involved in FM, however, is uncertain. Although medial temporal lobe/diencephalic (MTL/D) damage impairs content o...

On the basis of their scores on composite measures of frontal and temporal lobe function, derived from neuropsychological testing, seniors were divided preexperimentally into 4 groups. Participants studied a list of unrelated words under full attention and recalled them while concurrently performing an animacy decision task to words, an odd-digit i...

Forty-eight healthy adults aged 65-85 were recruited for structural magnetic resonance scans after an extensive neuropsychological battery that ensured a high degree of variability across the sample in performance on long-term memory tests, and on tests traditionally thought to rely on prefrontal cortex. Gray matter volumes were measured for three...

The dual-process model of recognition memory proposed by Jacoby (1991; see also Mandler, 1980) postulates the existence of two independent components of recognition memory: a conscious retrieval process (recollection) and an automatic component (familiarity). Older adults appear to be impaired in recollection, but findings with respect to familiari...