R. Shayna Rosenbaum

York University · Department of Psychology

Prolonged stress and the need for rapid uptake of information can have detrimental effects on memory and cognition, whereas meaningfulness of study material and motivation to learn can have positive effects. How do these opposing conditions impact workplace learning in essential frontline workers during a global pandemic? We analyzed learning data...

Background: Vaccine hesitancy and resistance pose significant threats to controlling pandemics and preventing infectious diseases. In a group of individuals unvaccinated against the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (COVID-19), we investigated how age, intolerance of uncertainty (IU), and their interaction affected the likelihood of havi...

Research suggests that discounting of delayed rewards (i.e., tendency to choose smaller immediate rewards over large later rewards) is a promising target of intervention to encourage compliance with public health measures (PHM), such as vaccination compliance. The effects of delay discounting, however, may differ across the types of PHMs, given tha...

Objective: Past research has shown that self-reported everyday strategy use and task-specific strategy use are related to associative memory performance in aging. Understudied is the relationship between these types of strategy use, whether they predict associative memory performance, and how this may differ across genders. Method: A sample of o...

Evidence suggests that individual hippocampal subfields are preferentially involved in various memory‐related processes. Here, we demonstrated dissociations in these memory processes in two unique individuals with near‐selective bilateral damage within the hippocampus, affecting the dentate gyrus (DG) in case BL and the cornu ammonis 1 ( CA1) subfi...

Unitization - the fusion of objects into a single unit through an action/consequence sequence - can mitigate relational memory impairments, but the circumstances under which unitization is effective are unclear. Using transverse patterning (TP), we compared unitization (and its component processes of fusion, motion, and action/consequence) with ext...

Objective In normative aging, there is a decline in associative memory that appears to relate to self-reported everyday use of general memory strategies (Guerrero et al., 2021). Self-reported general strategy use is also strongly associated with self-reported memory abilities (Frankenmolen et al., 2017), which, in turn, are weakly associated with o...

Scientific evidence regularly guides policy decisions¹, with behavioural science increasingly part of this process². In April 2020, an influential paper³ proposed 19 policy recommendations (‘claims’) detailing how evidence from behavioural science could contribute to efforts to reduce impacts and end the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we assess 747 pandem...

Classic findings of impaired allocentric (observer-independent) spatial learning and memory in individuals with lesions to the hippocampus provide strong support for the long-held view that the hippocampus is necessary for supporting a cognitive map of one’s environment. Most of these studies assess navigation in vista-space virtual reality (VR) en...

The hippocampus is known to support processing of precise spatial information in recently learned environments. It is less clear, but crucial for theories of systems consolidation, to know whether it also supports processing of precise spatial information in familiar environments learned long ago and whether such precision extends to objects and nu...

To what extent does incidental encoding of auditory stimuli influence subsequent episodic memory for the same stimuli? We examined whether the mismatch negativity (MMN), an event-related potential generated by auditory change detection, is correlated with participants' ability to discriminate those stimuli (i.e. targets) from highly similar lures a...

Few studies have examined the stability of discounting responses over time. We examined delay and probabilistic discounting of losses at two time points, 13-16 months apart. We found that people do change over time in the frequency with which they select immediate and certain losses. These changes in discounting steepness for delayed and probabilis...

The cover image is based on the Advanced Review What about “space” is important for episodic memory? by Carina L. Fan et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1645 . Image Credit: Sadie Levine. image

Early cognitive neuroscientific research revealed that the hippocampus is crucial for spatial navigation in rodents, and for autobiographical episodic memory in humans. Researchers quickly linked these streams to propose that the human hippocampus supports memory through its role in representing space, and research on the link between spatial cogni...

A schema refers to a structured body of prior knowledge that captures common patterns across related experiences. Schemas have been studied separately in the realms of episodic memory and spatial navigation across different species and have been grounded in theories of memory consolidation, but there has been little attempt to integrate our underst...

Widespread vaccination is necessary to minimize or halt the effects of many infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Stagnating vaccine uptake can prolong pandemics, raising the question of how we might predict, prevent, and correct vaccine hesitancy and unwillingness. In a multinational sample (N = 4,452) recruited from 13 countries that varied in...

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...

Widespread vaccination is necessary to minimize or halt the effects of many infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Stagnating vaccine uptake can prolong pandemics, raising the question of how we might predict, prevent, and correct vaccine hesitancy and unwillingness. In a multinational sample (N=4,452) recruited from 13 countries that varied in p...

Knowledge and belief attribution are discussed in the context of episodic and semantic memory theory and research, with reference to patient-lesion and developmental studies under naturalistic conditions. Consideration of how episodic and semantic memory relate to each other and intersect in the real world, including how they fail, can illuminate t...

Mnemonic discrimination, the process of distinguishing highly similar items in memory, relies on the dentate gyrus (DG) subregion of the hippocampus. The Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST) has been shown to be a sensitive behavioral measure of mnemonic discrimination that is in wide use (Liu et al., 2016). In this study, we evaluate the sensitivity and...

How well do we know our city? It turns out, much more poorly than we might imagine. We used declarative memory and eye-tracking techniques to examine people’s ability to detect modifications of landmarks in Toronto locales with which they have had extensive experience. Participants were poor at identifying which scenes contained altered landmarks,...

We move our eyes to explore the visual world, extract information, and create memories. The number of gaze fixations—the stops that the eyes make—has been shown to correlate with activity in the hippocampus, a region critical for memory, and with later recognition memory. Here, we combined eyetracking with fMRI to provide direct evidence for the re...

The spacing effect refers to the finding that, given a fixed amount of study time, a longer interval between study repetitions improves long-term retention (e.g., Cepeda et al., 2006; Ebbinghaus, 1885/1967; Melton, 1970). Although the spacing effect is a robust and reliable finding in the memory literature, its cognitive and neural mechanisms remai...

We are so tuned to sensory changes that we can detect novelty within hundreds of milliseconds. To what extent does our capacity to automatically discriminate auditory inputs influence encoding of long-term memories? We recorded mismatch negativity (MMN), an event-related potential (ERP) indexing perceptual discrimination, as participants were prese...

Traditionally considered a memory structure, the hippocampus has been shown to contribute to non-memory functions, from perception to language. Recent evidence suggests that the ability to differentiate highly confusable faces could involve pattern separation, a mnemonic process mediated by the hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG). Hippocampal involvemen...

We move our eyes to explore the visual world, extract information, and create memories. The number of gaze fixations (the stops that the eyes make) has been shown to correlate with activity in the hippocampus, a region critical for memory, and with later recognition memory. Here, we combined eyetracking with fMRI to provide direct evidence for the...

As clear memories transport us back into the past, the brain also revives prior patterns of neural activity, a phenomenon known as neural reactivation. While growing evidence indicates a link between neural reactivation and typical variations in memory performance in healthy individuals, it is unclear how and to what extent reactivation is disrupte...

Remembering and imagining specific, personal experiences can help shape our decisions. For example, cues to imagine future events can reduce delay discounting (i.e., increase the subjective value of future rewards). It is not known, however, whether such cues can also modulate other forms of reward discounting, such as probability discounting (i.e....

Kent Cochrane (K.C.) has been investigated by researchers for nearly three decades after intracranial trauma from a motorcycle accident at age 30 resulted in a striking profile of amnesia. K.C. suffered severe anterograde amnesia in both verbal and non-verbal domains which was accompanied by selective retrograde amnesia for personal events experien...

The value of case studies in informing our understanding of dissociations and interactions in memory was recognized early on by Endel Tulving, whose comprehensive work with the amnesic case K.C. helped to confirm distinctions between episodic and semantic memory. Following in this tradition, we examined memory and the use of cognitive strategies in...

Healthy older adults show impaired relational learning, but improved transitive expression when inferences are made across pre-experimentally known premise relations. Here, we used the transitivity paradigm to ask whether the organizational structure within schemas facilitates the bridging of relations for novel inference for otherwise healthy olde...

The Self-Reference Effect (SRE), enhanced memory for self-related information, has been established in healthy young and older adults but has had limited study in age-related memory disorders such as amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI). Additionally, the majority of SRE studies have been conducted using trait adjective paradigms, which lack e...

Recent research indicates the hippocampus may code the distance to the goal during navigation of newly learned environments. It is unclear however, whether this also pertains to highly familiar environments where extensive systems-level consolidation is thought to have transformed mnemonic representations. Here we recorded fMRI while University Col...

A number of theories have postulated that there is a strong relationship between episodic memory and spatial processes mediated by the hippocampus. Evidence for episodic amnesia following damage to the medial temporal lobes is extensive, but less is known about the types of spatial memory affected by damage to these regions. In this study, we compa...

Many studies have shown that repetition of study material with temporal gaps between the repetitions (i.e., spaced in time) is more effective for long-term retention than are repetitions in immediate succession (i.e., massed; Greene, 1989). Although this spacing effect has proven to be robust in the laboratory (Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohre...

Traditionally, studies of spatial memory tend to utilise table-top tasks that focus on new spatial learning, however these in-lab procedures may not be reflective of real world spatial memory or navigation. This study investigated the relationship between self-rated navigation abilities and performance on a naturalistic Internet-based assessment of...

Objectives: Although the spacing effect has been investigated extensively in a variety of populations, few studies have focused on individuals with hippocampal amnesia and none, to our knowledge, have investigated differences in performance as a function of spacing schedule in these cases. In the current study, we investigated the benefit of expan...

Nicole Carson, R. Shayna Rosenbaum, Morris Moscovitch, AND Kelly J. Murphy doi: 10.1017/S1355617718000395. Published online by Cambridge University Press on 2 August 2018. The paper by Carson et al. (2018) contains an error on page 821 that should be brought to the attention of readers. It is listed here, along with the incorrect and correct copy:...

Objectives: The self-reference effect (SRE), enhanced memory for self-related information, has been studied in healthy young and older adults but has had little investigation in people with age-related memory disorders, such as amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). Self-referential encoding may help to improve episodic memory in aMCI. Additio...

The ability to represent the world accurately relies on simultaneous coarse and fine-grained neural information coding, capturing both gist and detail of an experience. The longitudinal axis of the hippocampus may provide a gradient of representational granularity in spatial and episodic memory in rodents and humans [1-8]. Rodent place cells in the...

The thalamic nuclei are thought to play a critical role in recognition memory. Specifically, the anterior thalamic nuclei and medial dorsal nuclei may serve as critical output structures in distinct hippocampal and perirhinal cortex systems, respectively. Existing evidence indicates that damage to the anterior thalamic nuclei leads to impairments i...

Much of the richness in human life derives from episodic memory, mental representations of detailed experiences from our personal pasts. To make sense of those experiences, knowledge about the world and oneself must also exist in a form that is free of context – known as semantic memory. This chapter revisits and builds on Tulving's distinction bet...

Adapting the Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST) to assess pattern separation of highly similar everyday sounds in healthy aging.

Increased place field size and signal autocorrelation along the dorsoventral hippocampal axis in rodents are considered a fundamental aspect of hippocampal organization, yet such evidence is lacking in humans. Using fMRI, we report corresponding evidence of increasing neural similarity from posterior to anterior hippocampus (dorsoventral homologues...

Autobiographical remembering and future imagining overlap in their underlying psychological and neurological mechanisms. The hippocampus and surrounding regions within the medial temporal lobes (MTL), known for their role in forming and maintaining autobiographical episodic memories, are also thought to play an essential role in fictitious and futu...

An important theory holds that semantic knowledge can develop independently of episodic memory. One strong source of evidence supporting this independence comes from the observation that individuals with early hippocampal damage leading to developmental amnesia generally perform normally on standard tests of semantic memory, despite their profound...

Patient K.C.: neuropathology of a unique case of memory impairment - Volume 44 Issue S1 - A.F. Gao, R.S. Rosenbaum, F.Q. Gao, M. Moscovitch, E. Tulving, S.E. Black, J.L. Keith

Our day-to-day experiences are often similar to one another, occurring in the same place at the same time of day, with common people and objects, and with a shared purpose. Humans have an episodic memory to represent unique, personal events that are rich in detail [ 1 ]. For this to occur, at least two basic neural mechanisms are required: one to o...

Amnesia is associated with impairments in relational memory, which is critically supported by the hippocampus. By adapting the transitivity paradigm, we previously showed that age-related impairments in inference were mitigated when judgments could be predicated on known pairwise relations, however such advantages were not observed in the adult-ons...

To investigate the role of episodic thought about the past and future in moral judgment, we administered a well-established moral judgment battery to individuals with hippocampal damage and deficits in episodic thought (insert Greene et al. 2001). Healthy controls select deontological answers in high-conflict moral scenarios more frequently when th...

Current evidence suggests that two spatially distinct neuroanatomical networks, the dorsal attention network (DAN) and the default mode network (DMN), support externally and internally oriented cognition, respectively, and are functionally regulated by a third, frontoparietal control network (FPC). Interactions among these networks contribute to no...

Does advantageous decision-making require one to explicitly remember the outcome of a series of past decisions or to imagine future personal consequences of one's choices? Findings that amnesic people with hippocampal damage cannot form a clear preference for advantageous decks over many learning trials on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) have been tak...

Resonance with the inner states of another social actor is regarded as a hallmark of emotional closeness. Nevertheless, sensitivity to potential incongruities between one's own and an intimate partner's subjective experience is reportedly also important for close relationship quality. Here, we tested whether perceivers show greater neurobehavioral...

The self-reference effect (SRE), enhanced memory for information encoded through self-related processing, has been established in younger and older adults using single trait adjective words. We sought to examine the generality of this phenomenon by studying narrative information in these populations. Additionally, we investigated retrieval experien...

Optimal social functioning occasionally requires concealment of one's emotions in order to meet one's immediate goals and environmental demands. However, because emotions serve an important communicative function, their habitual suppression disrupts the flow of social exchanges and, thus, incurs significant interpersonal costs. Evidence is accruing...

Objectives To determine whether severity of episodic prospection impairment in medial temporal lobe (MTL) amnesia is reduced by the types of cues that are used to elicit personal future episodes and, if so, whether episodic memory impairment is similarly affected.DesignMultiple case study of five individuals with MTL amnesia and healthy control par...

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

Aging has been associated with a decline in relational memory, which is critically supported by the hippocampus. By adapting the transitivity paradigm (Bunsey & Eichenbaum, 1996), which traditionally has been used in non-human animal research, this work examined the extent to which aging is accompanied by deficits in relational learning and flexibl...

Current evidence suggests that two spatially distinct neuroanatomical networks, the dorsal attention network (DAN) and the default mode network (DMN), support externally and internally oriented cognition, respectively, and are functionally regulated by a third, frontoparietal control network (FPC). Interactions among these networks contribute to no...

Current evidence suggests that two spatially distinct neuroanatomical networks, the dorsal attention network (DAN) and the default mode network (DMN), support externally and internally oriented cognition, respectively, and are functionally regulated by a third, frontoparietal control network (FPC). Interactions among these networks contribute to no...

Recently, the amnesic case D.A. was shown to circumvent his relational memory impairments, as observed in the transverse patterning (TP) task, using a self-generated unitization strategy, and such performance benefits were maintained over extended delays (Ryan, Moses, Barense, & Rosenbaum, 2013). 'Unitization' encourages fusing of distinct items, t...

A trustworthy appearance is regarded as a marker of a globally positive personality and, thus, evokes a host of benevolent responses from perceivers. Nevertheless, it is yet to be determined whether the reverse is also true, that is, whether social targets who evoke unambiguously benign motivations in perceivers are regarded as possessing a more tr...

The hippocampus is believed to have evolved to support allocentric spatial representations of environments as well as the details of personal episodes that occur within them, whereas other brain structures are believed to support complementary egocentric spatial representations. Studies of patients with adult-onset lesions lend support to these dis...

Current theories state that the hippocampus is responsible for the formation of memory representations regarding relations, whereas extrahippocampal cortical regions support representations for single items. However, findings of impaired item memory in hippocampal amnesics suggest a more nuanced role for the hippocampus in item memory. The hippocam...

How does the ability to imagine detailed future experiences (i.e., episodic prospection) contribute to choices between immediate and delayed rewards? Individuals with amnesia do not show abnormally steep discounting in intertemporal choice, suggesting that neither medial temporal lobe (MTL) integrity nor episodic prospection is required for the val...

Several recent studies have compared episodic and spatial memory in neuroimaging paradigms in order to understand better the contribution of the hippocampus to each of these tasks. In the present study, we build on previous findings showing common neural activation in default network areas during episodic and spatial memory tasks based on familiar,...

Current evidence suggests that two spatially distinct neuroanatomical networks, the dorsal attention network (DAN) and the default mode network (DMN), support externally and internally oriented cognition, respectively, and are functionally regulated by a third, frontoparietal control network (FPC). Interactions among these networks contribute to no...

The capacity to anticipate future experiences of regret has been hypothesized to explain otherwise irrational aspects of human decision-making, including the certainty effect (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) and the common ratio effect (Allais, 1953). The anticipated regret hypothesis predicts that individuals incapable of episodically imagining their...