This article proposes the concept of ‘memory script’ to analyse how, in the aftermath of political violence, memory activists narrate their lives in a way that is practised, repetitive and performative. Through a self-reflective life history of Aluízio Palmar, a Brazilian human rights activist and former political prisoner who suffered intense torture under military rule, this approach seeks to elucidates the personal and political contours of somebody's decision to transform their experiences into a public narrative. A close reading of Palmar's various platforms of memory-sharing reveals the complex moral reckoning of an activist's own trauma.

This article examines the construction of a multifaceted collective memory through the main female protagonists in Song of the Water Saints (2002) by the Dominican American author Nelly Rosario. By bridging memory studies, Latin American studies, and Afro-Latinx studies, the book examines racial and gendered constructs, intergenerational struggles, US imperialism, and Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship to show the interconnected nature of memorial articulations for subaltern subjects. Through a literary close reading, this article dissects the lives of three generations of female characters—Graciela, her daughter Mercedes, and Graciela’s great-granddaughter Leila—and how they challenge, reinforce, and suffer racialized, political, and gendered subjectivities. By examining intersectional and historical trauma simultaneously, this study contributes to the field of memory, Afro-Latinx, and Latin American studies by showing the muddled construct of memory for Dominicans and Dominican Americans.

What kind of times are these when a talk about trees is almost a crime? Among other things, they are times of forgetfulness. Forgetting does not mean that reminiscences just vanish as time goes by. It is, on the contrary, a major cultural force grounded in a politics of anti-memory. One needs to forget in order to keep repeating oneself. In this article, I argue that the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro did not burn to the ground merely because of the lack of resources, but because being burned to the ground has always been a virtual feature of the existence of the museum since it was created in 1818. It burned as part of a long-term politics of anti-memory in Brazilian history.

In 2013, Argentina's then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sparked controversy for her decision to replace a monument of Christopher Columbus in Buenos Aires with one of nineteenth-century mestiza revolutionary Juana Azurduy. This article examines the history and iconography of these monuments, exploring the intersections between public space, art, politics and memory. It argues that these monuments — one representing Argentina's previously maligned Italian immigrant heritage, the other its forgotten indigenous culture — demonstrate how fundamental struggles over national identity have been embedded and contested in the capital's urban landscape, in ways that remain influential. It highlights Argentina's 1910 centennial and 2010 bicentennial as key to these efforts, and examines the power/politics of place in the central plaza where various actors have fought for public commemorative representation.

Narratives of memory have received considerable attention in Argentina but rarely have these been examined in relation to the 1982 Malvinas War. This article focuses on national memory narratives of the war manifest in educational resources and explores how and under what conditions local ways of remembering can transform and/or reproduce such narratives, through research within secondary schools in Río Gallegos, a city in the south of Argentina. It shows how the city's connections with the military and the war generated sensitivities that influenced how the Malvinas was engaged in the classroom. The localised framings deviated from predominant national memory narratives by underplaying the broader context of state terror and overlooking histories associated with the Malvinas before 1982.

A grandmaster and an international chess master were compared with a group of novices in a memory task with chess and non-chess stimuli, varying the structure and familiarity of the stimuli, while functional magnetic resonance images were acquired. The pattern of brain activity in the masters was different from that of the novices. Masters showed no differences in brain activity when different degrees of structure and familiarity where compared; however, novices did show differences in brain activity in such contrasts. The most important differences were found in the contrast of stimulus familiarity with chess positions. In this contrast, there was an extended brain activity in bilateral frontal areas such as the anterior cingulate and the superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyri; furthermore, posterior areas, such as posterior cingulate and cerebellum, showed great bilateral activation. These results strengthen the hypothesis that when performing a domain-specific task, experts activate different brain systems from that of novices. The use of the experts-versus-novices paradigm in brain imaging contributes towards the search for brain systems involved in cognitive processes.

A new memory model is proposed based on regression analysis and exponential- shaped learning curves. The efficacy of the model is tested with several types of experiments including food aversion in snails, maze learning in rats and memory tests for adults and children. The model is also tested on drug abusers and alcoholics. The results of goodness of fit tests indicate that our model can accurately be used to predict the memory dynamics of diverse experiments and populations. The model can also be used to predict both group and individual performance. The application of the model to detect memory impairment is discussed, as are limitations.

This article addresses the various mechanisms by which the religious figure of the Christian martyr became a useful notion in Argentine political discourse. It argues that the process by which the idea of the ‘martyr’ was secularised and politicised was actually initiated by religious agents themselves. The analysis considers how commemoration initiatives devised by religious agents, social movements and political actors have brought ‘Catholic martyrs’ into the pantheon of national symbols. It also deals with the various semantic shifts seen in the public discourses of religious agents themselves, shifts that extend the boundaries of an eminently religious category by associating it with other figures in a more specifically political imaginary, such as that of the hero and the victim. The article shows how the political power of the religious figure of the martyr lay in the way various actors could use it to invoke the image of a legitimate and heroic victim of political violence. It thus allowed those actors to sidestep the vexed public question of whether those being commemorated had had any involvement in armed struggle.

The concept of prospective memory is relatively recent. Thus, it is necessary to have instruments to assess it, in interaction with retrospective memory. The Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ; Smith et al., 2000) is an instrument that has been effectively used for assessment in several languages. Nevertheless, there is still no Spanish adaptation. The aim of this study was to translate the PRMQ and obtain information about its psychometric properties. A back translation process was applied to the PRMQ. The resulting PRMQ-S was self-administered to 520 subjects after applying the pilot test. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test competing models of its latent structure. Internal consistency was evaluated using Cronbach's alpha. The results showed an adequate internal consistency of the total scale and the Prospective and Retrospective scales were: .89, .84 and .76, respectively. The factor structure was compared with the original study. Our results suggested a disagreement with the tripartite model defended by the authors of the PRMQ. Since there is a high correlation between two factors in the bi-factor model, and the tripartite model showed non-significant loadings to the two specific factors, we recommend that the PRMQ-S be used as one general memory score. We demonstrated adequate psychometric properties of the PRMQ-S if it is used as unique measurement of memory failures. These results are relevant due to the need for a short and accurate instrument in our language that explores memory failures, which has a major impact on the activities of daily living.

This experiment compares the yes-no and forced recognition tests as methods of measuring familiarity. Participants faced a phase of 3 study-test recognition trials in which they studied words using all the letters of the alphabet (overlapping condition, O), and an additional phase in which targets and lures did not share any letters (non-overlapping condition, NO). Finally, subjects performed a forced-choice task in which they had to choose one of two new words, each from one of the subsets (Parkin et al., 2001). Results in the NO condition were better than in the O condition in the yes-no recognition test, while the forced-choice rate was significantly higher than .50, showing their sensitivity to familiarity. When the letter set of the words for study in the third list of the NO condition was switched, the difference between NO and O conditions disappeared in yes-no test, while the force-choice rate was not higher than .50. We conclude that both the yes-no test and the forced-choice test are valid and equivalent measures of familiarity under the right conditions.

La manera más efectiva de afrontar un acontecimiento traumático es desarrollar una narración, que puede adoptar muchas formas, p. ej., hablar con los amigos y la familia, el tratamiento formal, los relatos escritos. Los trabajos autobiográficos y las novelas de antiguos soldados son buenos ejemplos de textos que pueden ayudar a la comprensión de los psicólogos del estres traumático, proporcionando potentes ideas no obtenidas normalmente mediante los métodos psicológicos tradicionales. Sin novedad en el frente de Remarque ilustra los problemas psicológicos experimentados por los hombres en combate. Los psicólogos rara vez han utilizado las novelas como fuentes de datos y, sin embargo, estas obras proporcionan una rica comprensión de los problemas asociados con los acontecimientos traumáticos. Las cuestiones planteadas en el libro incluyen: un relato de la experiencia de combate, la comprensión de los civiles, la memoria y el afrontamiento. Se puede utilizar este enfoque para extender nuestro conocimiento de las situaciones traumáticas.

Después de la terapia electroconvulsiva (TEC), muchos pacientes experimentan una disminución en su capacidad mnésica. Estudiamos la memoria episódica en ocho pacientes con depresión grave tratados con una tanda de TEC unilateral derecha. Con este fin, los autores construyeron un instrumento de prueba. Lo componían tarjetas de cartulina que contenían cuatro datos, a saber: una palabra, un número, una figura y el color de la tarjeta. Se presentaba una de las tarjetas a los pacientes y se pedía la información correspondiente al día siguiente. Se examinó a los pacientes cada mañana durante las dos primeras sema-nas de la tanda de TEC. Aproximadamente la mitad de las respuestas fueron correctas. Los pacientes recordaron mejor el color, y peor el número. Siete de los pacientes mostraron perseveraciones verbales. Esto está de acuerdo con las publicaciones sobre perseveración en los pacientes con déficit neurológicos, especialmente en las tareas de inhibición proactiva. La perseveración se puede atribuir a un déficit en la atención selectiva, que produce una activación de claves irrelevantes.

Se propone que los pacientes con trastorno de angustia tienen un defecto en la memoria episódica relacionada con el miedo, y sus crisis de angustia se originan en el recuerdo automático del conglomerado emocional-autonómico relacionado con el miedo. El conglomerado en tanto componente de miedo parece haber sido disociado de la estructura cognitiva (la huella de memoria episódica o informativa) o de la “estructura de información”. Se creó un método especial para examinar esta hipótesis en que se pidió a 30 pacientes con trastorno de angustia, 12 controles sanos y 32 pacientes con otros diagnósticos psiquiátricos, que recordaran y describieran una experiencia que le produjera temor. Ninguno de los pacientes en el grupo de trastorno de angustia pudo recordar acontecimiento o episodio alguno en su pasado que le produjera temor. Todos los sujetos menos uno entre los controles sanos y todos los sujetos en el grupo sin angustia pudieron recordar un acontecimiento o episodio o más que le produjera temor. Se analizan las posibles implicaciones teóricas de estos resultados en el contexto de algunos conceptos clásicos.

Analizamos las propiedades psicomiméticas de la Cannabis sativa y exploramos la relación entre la intoxicación por cannabis y el estado de ánimo en el contexto del descubrimiento del ligando cerebral para el receptor de esta sustancia y el esclarecimiento de su secuencia genética. Proponemos que sería valiosa una renovación del estudio de la encefalopatía aguda por cannabis, no sólo para profundizar nuestra comprensión de la consciencia en los adultos sanos, sino también para ayudamos a entender el mundo perceptivo del niño, el anciano y algunos de nuestros pacientes.