
Signy SheldonMcGill University | McGill · Department of Psychology
Signy Sheldon
Ph.D.
About
96
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Introduction
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January 2015 - May 2017
January 2015 - present
September 2010 - October 2011
Publications
Publications (96)
Negative self-schemas are fundamental to social anxiety disorder and contribute to its persistence, thus understanding how to change schemas is of critical importance. Memory-based interventions and associated theories propose that reconstructing autobiographical memories tethered to schemas with conceptual details that challenge the associated exp...
While cognitive aging research has compared episodic memory accuracy between younger and older adults, less work has described differences in how memories are encoded and recalled. This is important for memories of real-world experiences, since there is immense variability in which details can be accessed and organized into narratives. We investiga...
Recollecting an autobiographical memory requires a cue to initiate processes related to accessing and then elaborating on a past personal experience. Prior work has shown that the familiarity of a cue can influence the autobiographical memory retrieval process. Extending this work, we tested how familiarity accrued from cumulative lifetime exposure...
Much like recalling autobiographical memories, constructing imagined autobiographical events depends on episodic memory processes. The ability to imagine events contributes to several future-oriented behaviors (e.g., decision-making, problem solving), which relies, in part, on the ability to remember the imagined events. A factor affecting the memo...
Contemporary neurocognitive frameworks propose that conceptual and perceptual content of autobiographical memories—personal past experiences—are processed by dissociable neural systems. Other work has proposed a central role of the anterior hippocampus in initially constructing autobiographical memories, regardless of the content. Here, we report o...
Aging comes with declines in episodic memory. Memory decline is accompanied by structural and functional alterations within key brain regions, including the hippocampus and lateral prefrontal cortex, as well as their affiliated default and frontoparietal control networks. Most studies have examined how structural or functional differences relate to...
Cognitive aging research has focused on comparing episodic memory accuracy between young and old adults. Less work has described qualitative shifts in how episodic memories are encoded and recalled. This is especially relevant for memories of real-world experiences, since there is immense variability in which details can be accessed and organized i...
Research has documented a strong link between constructing episodic simulations—vivid imaginations of specific events—and empathy. To date, most studies have used episodic simulations of helping someone to facilitate affective empathy and promote helping intentions, but have not studied how episodic simulations of another’s distressing situation af...
An adaptive memory system is one that allows us to both retrieve detailed memories as well as generalize knowledge about our past, the latter termed memory generalization and is useful for making inferences about new situations. Research has indicated that memory generalization relies on forming knowledge structures by integrating experiences with...
Choices made in everyday life are highly variable. Sometimes, you may find yourself choosing between two similar options (e.g., breakfast foods to eat) and other times between two dissimilar options (e.g., what to buy with a gift certificate). The goal of the present study was to understand how the similarity of choice options affects our ability t...
Several studies have shown that older adults generate autobiographical memories with fewer specific details than younger adults, a pattern typically attributed to age-relate declines in episodic memory. A relatively unexplored question is how aging affects the content used to represent and recall these memories. We recently proposed that older adul...
Retrieving an autobiographical memory requires a cue to initiate processes related to accessing and then elaborating on a past personal experience. Prior work has shown that the familiarity of a cue can influence the autobiographical memory retrieval process. Extending on this work, we tested how different aspects of cue familiarity—i.e., amount of...
Autobiographical memory (AM) involves a rich phenomenological re-experiencing of a spatio-temporal event from the past, which is challenging to objectively quantify. The Autobiographical Interview (AI; Levine et al. Psychology and Aging, 17(4), 677-689, 2002) is a manualized performance-based assessment designed to quantify episodic (internal) and...
Relating learned information to similar yet new scenarios, transfer of learning, is a key characteristic of expert reasoning in many fields including medicine. Psychological research indicates that transfer of learning is enhanced via active retrieval strategies. For diagnostic reasoning, this finding suggests that actively retrieving diagnostic in...
Negative schemas lie at the core of many common and debilitating mental disorders. Thus, intervention scientists and clinicians have long recognized the importance of designing effective interventions that target schema change. Here, we suggest that the optimal development and administration of such interventions can benefit from a framework outlin...
A cardinal feature of episodic memory is the ability to generalize knowledge across similar experiences to make inference about novel events. Here, we tested if this ability to apply generalized knowledge exists for experiences that are similar in terms of underlying concepts, prior knowledge, and if this comes at the expense of another feature of...
Recollection of one’s personal past, or autobiographical memory (AM), varies across individuals and across the life span. This manifests in the amount of episodic content recalled during AM, which may reflect differences in associated functional brain networks. We take an individual differences approach to examine resting-state functional connectiv...
We propose that older adults’ ability to retrieve episodic autobiographical events, although often viewed through a lens of decline, reveals much about what is preserved and prioritized in cognitive aging. Central to our proposal is the idea that the so-called gist of an autobiographical event is not only spared with normal aging but also well adap...
Aging changes autobiographical memory (AM), yet the neural correlates of these changes are poorly understood, likely due to methodological variability across studies. We conducted a quantitative meta-analysis using activation likelihood estimation (GingerALE 3.0.2) to identify regions AM retrieval engaged in younger and older adults across 45 studi...
Recent work indicates that eye movements support the retrieval of episodic memories by reactivating the spatiotemporal context in which they were encoded. Although similar mechanisms have been thought to support simulation of future episodes, there is currently no evidence favoring this proposal. In the present study, we investigated the role of ey...
Healthy aging is associated with episodic memory decline, particularly in the ability to encode and retrieve object-context associations (context memory). Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have highlighted the importance of the medial temporal lobes (MTL) in supporting episodic memory across the lifespan. However, given the functional het...
Recollection of personal past events differs across the lifespan. Older individuals recall fewer episodic details and convey more semantic information than young. Here we examine how gray matter volumes in temporal lobe regions integral to episodic and semantic memory (hippocampus and temporal poles, respectively) are related to age differences in...
Emotional disorders, including depression, are associated with deficits in retrieving past and imagining future autobiographical events. Imagining future events requires accessing different types of information, from general conceptual knowledge to specific event details. Here, we tested the hypothesis that depression levels within a community samp...
Episodic memory plays a common role in constructing mental representations of past and imagined autobiographical events. Research has suggested that certain factors will affect how episodic memory is used during mental construction, such as the expectancy that an event will occur and the familiarity with an event's context. The aim of the current s...
Background: Effective shared decision-making in pediatric surgery requires clarity regarding which surgical outcomes are most important to patients and their families, and how they prefer to receive the information. Despite how essential this is for effective risk communication, little is known about the communication needs and preferences of patie...
Autobiographical memory (AM) involves a rich phenomenological re-experiencing of a spatio-temporal event from the past, which is challenging to objectively quantify. The Autobiographical Interview (AI; Levine et al., 2002, Psychology & Aging) is a manualized performance-based assessment designed to quantify episodic (internal) and semantic (externa...
Although it is understood that engaging in mental time travel to remember the past and imagine the future relies on similar cognitive processes, there are important differences. Notably, there is evidence that emotional valence differently affects how past and future events are accessed. Here, we explored the differential effect of emotional valenc...
Much of the evidence suggesting that rewards improve memory performance has focused on how explicit rewards facilitate encoding of simplistic stimuli. To expand beyond this focus, the current study tested how explicit rewards presented at encoding as well as retrieval facilitate memory for information contained within complex events. In a single ex...
Older adults display impairments in accessing episodic, but not semantic details, when specifically requested to construct autobiographical events. How aging affects access to autobiographical information under conditions of low retrieval constraint remains unclear. We examined the production of episodic and “non-episodic” details in young (n = 25)...
This study investigated the impact of encoding scenarios on sequential memory, specifcally testing the benefit of imagining a spatial context when learning a list of items. In Experiment 1, participants studied sequences of visually presented items after imagining a spatial context or a preparatory cue. At test, participants made recency judgments...
Although it is known that aging impairs episodic memory, the precise effect of aging on emotional memory is not fully understood. In this study, younger and older adults listened to narratives that contained general and emotional (positive, negative, or neutral) details as they viewed related images. When participants later recalled the narratives,...
Memories are not always accurately recalled, and one factor that influences memory is the goal of retrieval. Evidence suggests that retrieving a memory to fit a social goal affects the content that is recollected, yet the nature of this effect, and whether this effect remains stable over time, is not fully understood. To this end, we compared the e...
Recent work indicates that eye movements support the retrieval of episodic memories by reactivating the spatiotemporal context in which they were encoded. Although similar mechanisms have been thought to support simulation of future episodes, there is currently no evidence to support this proposal. In the present study, we investigated the role of...
Although it is understood that episodic memories of everyday events involve encoding a wide array of perceptual and non-perceptual information, it is unclear how these distinct types of information are recalled. To address this knowledge gap, we examine how perceptual (visual versus auditory) and non-perceptual details described within a narrative,...
Research has reported that repeatedly retrieving a novel or imagined event representation reduces activity within brain regions critical for constructing mental scenarios, namely the anterior hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). The primary aim of this investigation was to test if this pattern reported for imagined events would b...
Examining eye movement patterns when encoding and retrieving visually complex memories is useful to understand the link between visuo-perceptual processes and how associated details are represented within these memories. Here, we used images of real-world scenes (e.g., a couple grocery shopping) to examine how encoding and retrieval eye movements a...
Past work has shown that changes in encoding contexts (context shifts) act as boundaries across encountered items and can impair temporal memory. We address two questions about this effect: whether conceptual similarity among contexts creating a boundary can alleviate temporal memory impairments and if this effect holds for different forms of conte...
Although it is understood that our experience of time is fluid and subjective, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not well described. Based on event segmentation theory, we tested the hypothesis that changes in the context, particularly the spatial context, of an experience impact how an individual perceives (encodes) and remem...
Within autobiographical knowledge, semantic and episodic memory are traditionally considered separate, but newer models place them along a continuum, which raises the possibility of an intermediate form of knowledge - personal semantics. This study tested how different types of semantics – general semantics and two forms of personal semantics – imp...
Prior research has documented engagement of a common 'core' retrieval network during autobiographical memory retrieval and higher-order prospective tasks, such as personal problem solving. This neural overlap has overwhelmingly documented when a single mental event is simulated in detail during the 'elaboration phase' of retrieval. However, recolle...
Background
Increasing evidence shows that the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) is characterized by hippocampal atrophy. However, less is known about disease-related morphological hippocampal changes. The goal of the present study is to conduct a detailed characterization of the impact of svPPA on global hippocampus volume and...
The ability to mentally travel to specific events from one’s past, dubbed episodic autobiographical memory (E-AM), contributes to adaptive functioning. Nonetheless, the mechanisms underlying its typical inter-individual variation remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we capitalize on existing evidence that successful performance on E-AM...
If remembering the past requires a cue to stimulate mental reactivation of an experience (i.e., a memory), then the nature of the retrieval cue should bias how that experience is recalled. Based on the established link between emotion and memory, we tested how two emotional properties of a cue - valence (positive and negative) and arousal (high and...
Numerous studies have shown that the presence of psychosocial stress impairs the ability to retrieve episodic memories, which raise questions about the specific cognitive processes that underlie this impairment. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stress targets retrieval processes needed to reliability discriminate previously learned from new info...
We examined whether interindividual differences in cognitive functioning among older adults are related to episodic memory engagement during autobiographical memory retrieval. Older adults ( n = 49, 24 males; mean age = 69.93; mean education = 15.45) with different levels of cognitive functioning, estimated using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (...
The ability to mentally travel to specific events from one’s past, dubbed episodic autobiographical memory (E-AM), contributes to adaptive functioning. Nonetheless, the mechanisms underlying its typical inter-individual variation remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we capitalize on existing evidence that successful performance on E-AM...
Research indicates that episodic memory processes are required to access specific autobiographical events and the details encompassed by a single event for several functions, including remembering and personal problem solving. Since healthy cognitive aging is associated with episodic memory decline, we hypothesized that older adults would be impair...
Autobiographical experiences can be mentally constructed as generalised events or as spatial scenes. We investigated the commonalities and distinctions in using episodic and visual imagery processes to imagine autobiographical scenarios as events or scenes. Participants described personal scenarios framed as future events or spatial scenes. We anal...
Autobiographical memory retrieval is impacted by emotion, whether from an individual's mood state or a retrieval cue. Here, we addressed two questions concerning how emotion from these two sources affects the remembering of autobiographical experiences. The first question concerns whether emotional mood and retrieval cues both reliably impact the d...
Episodic memories can be modified when exposed to new and related information. This phenomenon, known as memory updating, is generally thought to be adaptive but can also lead to incorporating false information into a memory trace. Given the well-known effects of stress on episodic memory, we used a false information paradigm to investigate if acut...
Recalling and imagining autobiographical experiences involves constructing event representations within spatiotemporal contexts. We tested whether generating autobiographical events within a primarily spatial (where the event occurred) or temporal (the sequence of actions that occurred) context affected how the associated mental representation was...
Autobiographical memory retrieval involves constructing mental representations of personal past episodes by associating together an array of details related to the retrieved event. This construction process occurs flexibly so that the event details can be associated together in different ways during retrieval. Here, we propose that differences in h...
Navigated routes can be recalled by remembering a schematic layout or with additional sensory and perceptual details, engaging episodic memory processes. In this study, we contrasted the effects of these remembering approaches on retrieving real-world navigated routes, the impact on flexibly using familiar route information and on learning new spat...
Although acute psychosocial stress can impact autobiographical memory retrieval, the nature of this effect is not entirely clear. One reason for this ambiguity is because stress can have opposing effects on the different stages of autobiographical memory retrieval. We addressed this issue by testing how acute stress affects three stages of the auto...
Although humans have a remarkable capacity to recall a wealth of detail from the past, there are marked interindividual differences in the quantity and quality of our mnemonic experiences. Such differences in autobiographical memory may appear self-evident, yet there has been little research on this topic. In this review, we synthesize an emerging...
Although humans have a remarkable capacity to recall a wealth of detail from the past, there are marked inter-individual differences in the quantity and quality of our mnemonic experiences. Such differences in autobiographical memory may appear self-evident, yet there has been little research on this topic. In this review, we synthesize an emerging...
Autobiographical memory is notoriously difficult to study in the laboratory because it involves many different cognitive processes and is subject to several “real‐world” factors. It is imperative that we understand the processes involved in autobiographical memory given that these processes are affected in several conditions, such as depression and...
When choosing between options that vary in risk, we often rely on our experience with options—our episodic memories—to make that choice. Although episodic memory has been demonstrated to be critically involved in value-based decision-making, it is not clear how these memory processes contribute to decision-making that involves risk. To investigate...
The medial temporal lobes (MTL), and more specifically the hippocampus, are critical for forming mental representations of past experiences-autobiographical memories-and for forming other "nonexperienced" types of mental representations, such as imagined scenarios. How the MTL coordinate with other brain areas to create these different types of rep...
Constructing mental representations is critical for many cognitive tasks, yet it is unclear if forming different representations relies on distinct cognitive processes. We tested how episodic memory contributes to constructing scene and event-based mental scenarios as well as the effects of two types of imagery ability (object and spatial imagery)...
Remembering is impacted by several factors of retrieval, including the emotional content of a memory cue. Here we tested how musical retrieval cues that differed on two dimensions of emotion—valence (positive and negative) and arousal (high and low)—impacted the following aspects of autobiographical memory recall: the response time to access a past...
Although the ventromedial frontal lobe (VMF) has been implicated in several complex cognitive tasks such as decision-making and problem solving, the processes for which this region is critical remain unclear. Laboratory studies have largely focused on how the VMF contributes to decision-making when outcomes or options are provided, but in the real...
Autobiographical memory research has investigated how cueing distinct aspects of a past event, such as the event's overall theme or spatial context, can trigger different recollective experiences. This work has stimulated theories about how autobiographical knowledge is accessed and organized. Here, we test the idea that thematic information organi...
Recent work has suggested that there are functionally distinct contributions from hippocampal subregions to episodic memory retrieval. One view of this dissociation is that the anterior and posterior hippocampus support gist-based/conceptual and fine-grained/spatial memory representations, respectively. It is not clear if such distinctions hold for...
Individuals differ in how they mentally imagine past events. When reminiscing about a past experience, some individuals remember the event accompanied by rich visual images, while others will remember it with few of these images. In spite of the implications that these differences in the use of imagery have to the understanding of human memory, few...
Much has been learned about the processes that support the remembrance of past autobiographical episodes and their importance for a number of cognitive tasks. This work has focused on hippocampal contributions to constructing coherent mental representations of scenarios for these tasks, which has opened up new questions about the underlying hippoca...
People vary in how they remember the past: some recall richly detailed episodes; others more readily access the semantic features of events. The neural correlates of such trait-like differences in episodic and semantic remembering are unknown. We found that self-reported individual differences in how one recalls the past were related to predictable...
During autobiographical memory retrieval, the medial temporal lobes (MTL) relate together multiple event elements, including object (within-item relations) and context (item-context relations) information, to create a cohesive memory. There is consistent support for a functional specialization within the MTL according to these relational processes,...
During autobiographical memory retrieval, the medial temporal lobes (MTL) relate together multiple event elements, including object (intra-item or within-item relations) and context (item-context relations) information, to create a cohesive memory. There is consistent support for a functional specialization within the MTL according to these relatio...
Memory loss is one of the most common types of cognitive impairment affecting patients after stroke. Memory and related deficits are most severe in the first few weeks following stroke, but can persist for years after the episode [1-3]. The result is a reduction in quality of life, including decreased abilities in performing daily activities and in...
The relationship of higher order problem solving to basic neuropsychological processes likely depends on the type of problems to be solved. Well-defined problems (e.g., completing a series of errands) may rely primarily on executive functions. Conversely, ill-defined problems (e.g., navigating socially awkward situations) may, in addition, rely on...
Working memory impairments are prevalent among survivors of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), but few studies have examined specifically these impairments. Such an examination is important because working memory processes are vital for daily cognitive functioning. In the current study, patients with SAH and healthy control participants were...
A growing body of evidence suggests that the hippocampus contributes to performance (or is implicated) in non-memory domains from perception to problem solving. In a previous study we found that hippocampal contribution to exemplar generation in a fluency task was determined jointly by the open-endedness of the task and its ability to elicit episod...
Recent investigations have shown that the medial temporal lobe (MTL), a region thought to be exclusive to episodic memory, can also influence performance on tests of semantic memory. The present study examined further the nature of MTL contributions to semantic memory tasks by tracking MTL activation as participants performed category fluency, a tr...
Memory deficits for survivors of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) are common, however, the nature of these deficits is not well understood. In this study, 24 patients with SAH and matched control participants were asked to study six lists containing words from four different categories. For half the lists, the categories were presented toge...
A commonly held assumption is that processes underlying explicit and implicit memory are distinct. Recent evidence, however, suggests that they may interact more than previously believed. Using the remember-know procedure the current study examines the relation between recollection, a process thought to be exclusive to explicit memory, and performa...
A commonly held assumption is that consciousness is a defining feature that distinguishes explicit memory (with conscious awareness) from implicit memory (without conscious awareness). Although early studies support this notion, recent evidence suggests that conscious and non-conscious memory systems may share crucial underlying processes. Here, we...
Noise vocoding was used to investigate the ability of younger and older adults with normal audiometric thresholds in the speech range to use amplitude envelope cues to identify words. In Experiment 1, four 50-word lists were tested, with each word presented initially with one frequency band and the number of bands being incremented until it was cor...