The perception of the effectiveness of instrumental actions is influenced by depressed mood. Depressive realism (DR) is the claim that depressed people are particularly accurate in evaluating instrumentality. In two experiments, the authors tested the DR hypothesis using an action-outcome contingency judgment task. DR effects were a function of intertrial interval length and outcome density, suggesting that depressed mood is accompanied by reduced contextual processing rather than increased judgment accuracy. The DR effect was observed only when participants were exposed to extended periods in which no actions or outcomes occurred. This implies that DR may result from an impairment in contextual processing rather than accurate but negative expectations. Therefore, DR is consistent with a cognitive distortion view of depression.

Remembering to do something in the future (termed prospective memory) is distinguished from remembering information from the past (retrospective memory). Because prospective memory requires strong self-initiation, Craik (1986) predicted that age decrements should be larger in prospective than retrospective memory tasks. The aim of the present study was to assess Craik's prediction by examining the onset of age decline in two retrospective and three prospective memory tasks in the samples of young (18-30 years), young-old (61-70 years), and old-old (71-80 years) participants recruited from the local community. Results showed that although the magnitude of age effects varied across the laboratory prospective memory tasks, they were smaller than age effects in a simple three-item free recall task. Moreover, while reliable age decrements in both retrospective memory tasks of recognition and free recall were already present in the young-old group, in laboratory tasks of prospective memory they were mostly present in the old-old group only. In addition, older participants were more likely to report a retrospective than prospective memory failure as their most recent memory lapse, while the opposite pattern was present in young participants. Taken together, these findings highlight the theoretical importance of distinguishing effects of ageing on prospective and retrospective memory, and support and extend the results of a recent meta-analysis by Henry, MacLeod, Phillips, and Crawford (2004).

This study examines flashbulb memories of a salient recent and a distant public event to assess patterns of forgetting in the formal characteristics of these memories. Memories of a recent event (September 11) were compared to memories of a distant event (the death of Princess Diana) in several samples of British and one sample of Italian participants. In British participants, the 51-month old memories of the death of Princess Diana were as detailed and specific as their memories of a 3-month old event, September 11. Moreover, their memories of Princess Diana were not different from memories of September 11 collected immediately or very soon after September 11 in two other groups of British participants. Results suggest that flashbulb memories of a distant public event can be as detailed, specific and vivid as memories of a very recent event. For Italian participants, however, flashbulb memory scores for September 11 were reliably higher than for the death of Princess Diana. There was also a small albeit reliable loss of specificity in British participants' memories of September 11 over the subsequent three months.

The signal detection framework has been a cornerstone of discrimination research for more than half a century. Its key feature is the provision of distinct measures for sensitivity and bias that underpin basic and applied research into sensory and decision-making processes. Within this general framework, there are two main approaches: model based and nonparametric. The model-based approach makes explicit and testable assumptions about the distribution of the sensory representations of stimuli. By contrast, the nonparametric approach, which might preferably be termed distribution free, makes no assumptions about the form of sensory distributions. The aim of the present study is to evaluate measures of sensitivity and bias from both approaches. These include long established model-based measures from the theory of signal detectability (TSD) and Luce's choice theory, some recent nonparametric measures suggested by Balakrishnan and his colleagues (Balakrishnan, 1998a(Balakrishnan, , 1998b(Balakrishnan, , 1999Balakrishnan & MacDonald, 2002, and nonparametric areabased measures, with those for response bias presented here for the first time.The present work was prompted by the challenges posed by Balakrishnan and his colleagues (Balakrishnan, 1998a(Balakrishnan, , 1998b(Balakrishnan, , 1999Balakrishnan & MacDonald, 2002. They suggested that currently used TSD and choice measures of sensitivity and bias are fatally flawed. This is worrying because basic and applied researchers need to be able to choose appropriate measures of sensitivity and bias, secure in the knowledge that conclusions based on these measures are not flawed. These challenges are addressed empirically, using one of Balakrishnan's (1999) own very comprehensive data sets. In addition to evaluating existing measures of sensitivity and bias, we provide a new area-based measure of bias and new methods for assessing bias that summarize all data points, in those paradigms that use confidence ratings. We also assess the relative strengths of more and less constrained versions of Luce's choice theory and TSD.This article has three main sections. The theory section describes the key concepts, equations, and criteria necessary for empirical evaluations. The analysis section applies the criteria to empirical data from 4 individual participants making two-choice visual discriminations with confidence ratings (Balakrishnan, 1999). The final section discusses theoretical and practical implications of these analyses. THEORY, EQUATIONS, AND CRITERIAThis section will start with a brief overview of twochoice experimental paradigms and the general signal detection approach, including an explication of the term nonparametric. Then key equations of the model-based approaches will be provided. This will be followed by a description of distribution-free methods, including the new area-based measure of response bias. Then a new procedure for measuring the bias of complete receiveroperating characteristic (ROC) functions will be proposed. Finally, evaluation criteria for measu...

Research on ageing and prospective memory—remembering to do something in the future—has resulted in paradoxical findings, whereby older adults are often impaired in the laboratory but perform significantly better than younger adults in naturalistic settings. Nevertheless, there are very few studies that have examined prospective memory both in and outside the laboratory using the same sample of young and old participants. Moreover, most naturalistic studies have used time-based tasks, and it is unclear whether the prospective memory and ageing paradox extends to event-based tasks. In this study, 72 young (18–30 years), 79 young-old (61–70 years), and 72 old-old (71–80 years) participants completed several event-based tasks in and outside the laboratory. Results showed that the ageing paradox does exist for event-based tasks but manifests itself differently from that in time-based tasks. Thus, younger adults outperformed old-old participants in two laboratory event-based tasks, but there were no age effects for a naturalistic task completed at home (remembering to write the date and time in the upper left corner of a questionnaire). The young and old-old also did not differ in remembering to retrieve a wristwatch from a pocket at the end of the laboratory session. This indicates that the paradox may be due to differences in ongoing task demands in the lab and everyday life, rather than the location per se. The findings call for a concentrated effort towards a theory of cognitive ageing that identifies the variables that do, or do not, account for this paradox.