Rumination and Impaired Prospective Memory.

Prospective memory (PM), remembering to remember, is crucial to everyday functioning. Understanding factors associated with PM impairments is thus important. One likely factor is rumination: a common cognitive process comprising repetitive self-focused thoughts. We investigated whether rumination is associated with impaired PM, and whether any associated impairment is exacerbated with negative stimuli. A sentence-rating task with sentences varying in valence was used with embedded PM cues in a non-clinical sample (N = 60). State rumination, two trait rumination subtypes (reflective pondering and brooding), and mood were measured in relation to PM cue detection and response times. Results showed that state rumination was associated with impaired PM cue detection and slower response times to PM cues embedded in negative sentences (not positive or neutral). Trait brooding (not reflective pondering) was associated with slower PM response times. These findings indicate that state rumination and trait brooding are associated with dissociable PM impairments.

Visual memory transformations in dyslexia.

Representational Momentum refers to observers' distortion of recognition memory for pictures that imply motion because of an automatic mental process which extrapolates along the implied trajectory of the picture. Neuroimaging evidence suggests that activity in the magnocellular visual pathway is necessary for representational momentum to occur. It has been proposed that individuals with dyslexia have a magnocellular deficit, so it was hypothesised that these individuals would show reduced or absent representational momentum. In this study, 30 adults with dyslexia and 30 age-matched controls were compared on two tasks, one linear and one rotation, which had previously elicited the representational momentum effect. Analysis indicated significant differences in the performance of the two groups, with the dyslexia group having a reduced susceptibility to representational momentum in both linear and rotational directions. The findings highlight that deficits in temporal spatial processing may contribute to the perceptual profile of dyslexia.