Incidental visuospatial learning acquired under incidental conditions is more vulnerable to aging than in the intentional case. The theta and gamma correlates of the coding and retrieval of episodic memory change during aging. Based on the vulnerability of incidental coding to aging, different theta and gamma correlates could occur under the incidental versus intentional coding and retrieval of visuospatial information. Theta and gamma EEG was recorded from the frontotemporal regions, and incidental/intentional visuospatial learning was evaluated in young (25-60 years old) and elderly (60-85 years old) participants. The EEG recorded during encoding and retrieval was compared between incidental low-demand, incidental high-demand, and intentional conditions through an ANCOVA considering the patient\'s gender, IQ, and years of schooling as covariates. Older adults exhibited worse performances, especially in place-object associations. After the intentional study, older participants showed a further increase in false-positive errors. Higher power at the theta and gamma bands was observed for frontotemporal derivations in older participants for both encoding and retrieval. Under retrieval, only young participants had lower power in terms of errors compared with correct responses. In conclusion, the different patterns of power and coherence support incidental and intentional visuospatial encoding and retrieval in young and elderly individuals. The correlates of power with behavior are sensitive to age and performance.

Children sometimes learn distracting information better than adults do, perhaps because of the development of selective attention. To understand this potential link, we ask how the learning of children (aged 7-9 years) and the learning of adults differ when information is the directed focus of attention versus when it is not. Participants viewed drawings of common objects and were told to attend to the drawings (Experiment 1: 42 children, 35 adults) or indicate when shapes (overlaid on the drawings) repeated (Experiment 2: 53 children, 60 adults). Afterward, participants identified fragments of these drawings as quickly as possible. Adults learned better than children when directed to attend to the drawings; however, when drawings were task irrelevant, children showed better learning than adults in the first half of the test. And although directing attention to the drawings improved learning in adults, children learned the drawings similarly across experiments regardless of whether the drawings were the focus of the task or entirely irrelevant.

The present study addresses the main contention of the Noticing Hypothesis that conscious attention is necessary for successful learning. Arguments are given against the strong version of the hypothesis, under which one cannot acquire new language forms without conscious attention. Foreign learners were tested on their familiarity with formulaic expressions especially selected for their low salience. Additionally, the expressions used were tested for the likelihood of attracting attention. The results suggest that despite their inconspicuousness, such expressions are part of learners\' lexical representations. Students\' performance was found to correlate with usage patterns found in the input, a strong indication that their lexical representations are shaped by numerous encounters with specific uses of these expressions. It is argued that conscious attention is unlikely in even most, let alone all encounters. While the importance of awareness is not debated here, this study questions conscious attention as a default condition for learning.

More and more, people are abandoning the active pursuit of news, assuming instead that important information will be pushed to them via their social media networks. This approach to news makes people susceptible to the vast amounts of misinformation online, yet research on the effects of this kind of engagement is mixed. More research is needed on technology incidental learning effects, defined as changes in knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors as a result of being exposed to information while pursuing goals other than learning (e.g., entertainment). In this study, we examined how 51 college students responded to incidental exposure to accurate and inaccurate COVID-19 information delivered via a simulated social media environment. Participants\' verbalizations during think-aloud protocols indicated numerous mental processes including cognition, metacognition, epistemic cognition, motivation, and emotions. Positively valenced mental processing was more often expressed with accurate COVID-19 information and negatively valenced mental processing was more often verbalized with misinformation. Negatively valenced evaluations of knowledge claims and sources predicted less engagement with COVID-19 misinformation posts. However, in many cases the relations among verbalized mental processing and behavioral responses were complex or non-obvious. For example, participants\' positive metacognition and epistemic cognition verbalizations decreased their likelihood of engaging with accurate COVID-19 information, whereas positive interest was associated with an increased likelihood of engaging with misinformation. Our findings have implications for how to accurately infer people\'s beliefs and intentions from their social media behaviors and how to design interventions to help people be more active and thoughtful consumers of online information.

UNASSIGNED: Associative memory is arguably the most basic memory function and therein constitutes the foundation of all episodic and semantic memory processes. At the same time, the decline of associative memory represents a core feature of age-related cognitive decline in both, healthy and pathological (i.e., dementia-related) aging. The neural mechanisms underlying age-related impairments in associative memory are still not fully understood, especially regarding incidental (i.e., non-intentional) learning.
UNASSIGNED: We investigated the impact of age on the incidental learning and memory retrieval of face-name combinations in a total sample of 46 young (N = 23; mean age = 23.39 years) and elderly (N = 22, mean age = 69.05 years) participants. More specifically, particular interest was placed in age-related changes in encoding/retrieval (E/R) flips, which denote a neural antagonism of opposed activation patterns in the same brain region during memory encoding and retrieval, which were assessed using fMRI.
UNASSIGNED: According to our hypothesis, the results showed a significant age-related decline in the retrieval performance in the old group. Additionally, at the neural level, we discovered an abolished E/R flip in the right anterior insula and a joint but reduced E/R flip activation magnitude in the posterior middle cingulate cortex in older subjects.
UNASSIGNED: In conclusion, the present findings suggest that the impaired neural modulation of the E/R flip in the right aIC might be a sensitive marker in the early detection of neural aging.

Because of their evolutionary importance, it has been proposed that animate entities would be better remembered than inanimate entities. Although a growing body of evidence supports this hypothesis, it is still unclear whether the animacy effect persists under incidental learning conditions. Furthermore, few studies have tested the robustness of this effect in young children, with conflicting results. Using an incidental learning paradigm, we investigated whether young children (4- and 5-year-olds) would be better at learning words that refer to either human or animal entities rather than vehicle entities using pictures as stimuli. A sample of 79 children were asked to play digital Memory games while associations between pictures and words were presented incidentally. Consistent with the adaptive view of memory, the results showed that words associated with human and animal entities were better learned incidentally than words associated with vehicle entities. The visual complexity of the pictures did not influence this animacy effect. In addition, the more exposure to the pictures, the more incidental learning occurred. Overall, the results confirm the robustness of the animacy effect and show that this processing advantage can be found in an incidental learning task in children as young as 4 or 5 years. Furthermore, it is the first study to show that this effect can be obtained with pictures in children. The demonstration of the animacy effect with pictures, and not just words, is a prerequisite for an ultimate explanation of this effect in terms of survival.

Individual differences in speech recognition in challenging listening environments are pronounced. Studies suggest that implicit learning is one variable that may contribute to this variability. Here, we explored the unique contributions of three indices of implicit learning to individual differences in the recognition of challenging speech. To this end, we assessed three indices of implicit learning (perceptual, statistical, and incidental), three types of challenging speech (natural fast, vocoded, and speech in noise), and cognitive factors associated with speech recognition (vocabulary, working memory, and attention) in a group of 51 young adults. Speech recognition was modeled as a function of the cognitive factors and learning, and the unique contribution of each index of learning was statistically isolated. The three indices of learning were uncorrelated. Whereas all indices of learning had unique contributions to the recognition of natural-fast speech, only statistical learning had a unique contribution to the recognition of speech in noise and vocoded speech. These data suggest that although implicit learning may contribute to the recognition of challenging speech, the contribution may depend on the type of speech challenge and on the learning task.

Aging impairs both circadian rhythms and memory, though the relationship between these impairments is not fully understood. Circadian rhythms are largely dictated by clock genes within the body\'s central pacemaker, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), though these genes are also expressed in local clocks throughout the body. As circadian rhythms can directly affect memory performance, one possibility is that memory deficits observed with age are downstream of global circadian rhythm disruptions stemming from the SCN. Here, we demonstrate that expression of clock gene Period1 within a memory-relevant cortical structure, the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), is necessary for incidental learning, and that age-related disruption of Period1 within the RSC-but not necessarily the SCN-contributes to cognitive decline. These data expand the known functions of clock genes beyond maintaining circadian rhythms and suggests that age-associated changes in clock gene expression modulates circadian rhythms and memory performance in a brain region-dependent manner.

The current study examined, for the first time in a developmental perspective, the effect of response-to-stimulus interval (RSI) in incidental sequence learning (SL). Children aged 4, 7, and 10 years performed a serial reaction time (SRT) task in which the RSI was systematically manipulated (0, 250, 500, or 750 ms). SL (difference in reaction times between fixed and random blocks) was not observed for the youngest children whatever the RSI condition, whereas the 7-year-olds learned the sequence only in the 250-ms RSI condition and the 10-year-olds exhibited SL in all temporal conditions except the 500-ms RSI condition. Finally, the results suggest that conscious awareness of the sequence emerges only in older children faced with the 500- and 750-ms RSI conditions. The discussion questions the robustness of implicit learning processes in the light of individual and contextual factors.

UNASSIGNED: Long-COVID describes the long-term effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In long-COVID patients, neuropsychological alterations are frequently reported symptoms. Research points to medial temporal lobe dysfunction and its association with anosmia in long-COVID patients. This study aims to investigate the acquisition and consolidation of declarative and procedural memory in long-COVID patients and to explore whether anosmia is related to these dissociated memory functions.
UNASSIGNED: Forty-two long-COVID participants and 30 controls (C) were recruited. The sample of long-COVID patients was divided into two groups based on the presence or absence of anosmia, group A and group NA, respectively. Objective performance in verbal declarative memory (Paired-Associate Learning, PAL), procedural memory (Mirror Tracing Test, MTT), general cognitive function (Montreal Cognitive Assessment scale), psychomotor speed, and incidental learning (Digit Symbol Substitution Test) were assessed and compared among the A, NA, and C groups. Long-term retention of PAL and MTT were assessed 24 h after acquisition.
UNASSIGNED: Lower scores in general cognition, psychomotor speed, and sustained attention were found in A and NA compared with C. However, incidental learning, both cue-guided and free-recalled, was diminished in group A compared with C, with no differences with group NA. General cognition and incidental learning were related to declarative memory function exclusively in long-COVID groups. Long-COVID groups presented lower long-term retention of verbal declarative memory than controls in recall tests but no differences in recognition tests. No group differences were found in the acquisition of procedural memory. However, long-term retention of this memory was worse in group A as compared to the NA and C groups, respectively, when errors and time of execution were considered.
UNASSIGNED: Findings support that consolidation of both procedural and declarative memories is more affected than the acquisition of these memories in long-COVID patients, who are also more vulnerable to deficits in delayed recall than in recognition of declarative memories. Deficits in the consolidation of procedural memory and immediate recall of declarative information are especially relevant in long-COVID participants with anosmia. This indicates that anosmia in COVID-19 could be associated with a long-term dysfunction of the limbic system.