Extant research has shown that previously acquired categorical knowledge affects recognition memory, and that differences in category learning strategies impact classification accuracy. However, it is unknown whether different learning strategies also have downstream effects on subsequent recognition memory. The present study investigates the effect of two unidimensional rule-based category learning

Previous research has provided rich evidence that a set of visual objects can be encoded in isolation along with their exact coordinate positions as well as a global configuration that provides a network of interrelated spatial information. However, much less data is available on how unoccupied locations are encoded and maintained in memory. We tested this ability in adults using a novel paradigm that

Prior knowledge of relational structure allows people to quickly make sense of and respond to new experiences. When awareness of such structure is not necessary to support learning, however, it is unclear when and why individuals “spontaneously discover” an underlying relational schema. The present study examines the determinants of such discovery in discrimination-based transitive inference (TI),

The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction has been extended to predict that people should have metacognitive awareness of the disruptive effect of auditory deviants on cognitive performance but little to no such awareness of the disruptive effect of changing-state relative to steady-state auditory distractors. To test this prediction, we assessed different types of metacognitive judgments

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01206-w

Serial position effects involve the differential recall of information based on its temporal order at encoding. Previous research indicates that learners may be aware of these effects under certain encoding conditions, but it is unclear whether metacognitive control is sensitive to serial position effects. The current study examined whether there are serial position effects in participants’ study time

Unimodal and cross-modal information provided by faces and voices contribute to identity percepts. To examine how these sources of information interact, we devised a novel audio-visual sorting task in which participants were required to group video-only and audio-only clips into two identities. In a series of three experiments, we show that unimodal face and voice sorting were more accurate than cross-modal

In the classic view of verbal short-term memory, immediate recall is achieved by maintaining phonological representations, while the influence of other linguistic information is negligible. According to language-based accounts, short-term retention of verbal material is inherently bound to language production and comprehension, thus also influenced by semantic or syntactic factors. In line with this

Cultural life scripts are culturally transmitted semantic knowledge of the expected order and timing of major transitional events in a prototypical life course. This cognitive schema has been shown to serve as an important mnemonic template that guides retrieval from autobiographical memory, especially for positive and important life events. Autobiographical memory deficits are one of the earliest

Remembering to fulfill an intention at a later time often requires people to monitor the environment for cues that it is time to act. This monitoring involves the strategic allocation of attentional resources, ramping attention up more in some contexts than others. In addition to interfering with ongoing task performance, flexibly shifting attention may affect whether task-irrelevant information is

People can purposefully forget information that has become irrelevant, as is demonstrated in list-method directed forgetting (LMDF). In this task, participants are cued to intentionally forget an already studied list (list 1) before encoding a second list (list 2); this induces forgetting of the first-list items. Most research on LMDF has been conducted with short retention intervals, but very recent

Effects of divided attention (DA) during encoding on later memory performance are widely documented. However, the precise nature of these effects on underlying memory representations and subsequent retrieval processes has not been thoroughly investigated. Here, we examined whether DA at encoding would disrupt young adults’ ability to remember associations in episodic memory at highly specific levels

While cognitive control enables the selection of goal-relevant responses, metacontrol enables the selection of context-appropriate control operations. In task switching, metacontrol modulates task-switching efficiency by retrieving the associations between a contextual cue and a particular cognitive control demand. While the automatic retrieval of cognitive control is appealing due to its time and

This study addresses a poorly understood but important question concerning the cognition of deception: How much more is there to lying than to responding incorrectly, the latter capturing how researchers have occasionally operationalized deception? A recent social-cognitive account of lying – Activation-Decision-Construction-Action Theory (ADCAT) – asserts a qualitative difference between the two –

The Integrated Coherence-Based Decision and Search (iCodes) model proposed by Jekel et al. (Psychological Review, 125 (5), 744–768, 2018) formalizes both decision making and pre-decisional information search as coherence-maximization processes in an interactive network. Next to bottom-up attribute influences, the coherence of option information exerts a top-down influence on the search processes in

After learning about facts or outcomes of events, people overestimate in hindsight what they knew in foresight. Prior research has shown that this hindsight bias is more pronounced in older than in younger adults. However, this robust finding is based primarily on a specific paradigm that requires generating and recalling numerical judgments to general knowledge questions that deal with emotionally

Chess experts have repeatedly demonstrated exceptional recall of chessboards, which is weakened by disruption of the chessboard. However, chess experts still perform better than novices when recalling such disrupted chessboards, suggesting a somewhat generalized expertise effect. In the current study, we examined the extent of this generalized expertise effect on early processing of visuo-spatial working

What is the effect of source claims (such as “I saw it” or “Somebody told me”) on the believability of statements, and what mechanisms are responsible for this effect? In this study, we tested the idea that source claims impact statement believability by modulating the extent to which a speaker is perceived to be committed to (and thereby accountable for) the truth of her assertion. Across three experiments

Studies suggest that sleep benefits event-based prospective memory, which involves carrying out intentions when particular events occur. Prospective memory has a prospective component (remembering that one has an intention), and a retrospective component (remembering when to carry it out). As effects of sleep on retrospective memory are well established, the effect of sleep on prospective memory may

Previous evidence demonstrated that individuals can recall a target’s location in a search display even if location information is completely task-irrelevant. This finding raises the question: does this ability to automatically encode a single item’s location into a reportable memory trace extend to other aspects of spatial information as well? We tested this question using a paradigm designed to elicit

In almost every aspect of life, focusing on a target and ignoring distractors effectively is very important. Alternative to the common view, distraction may aid recognition via triggering automatic responses. Spontaneous recognition (SR) can be defined as the unintentional recognition of target stimuli and is measured by the effect of familiarity to distractors on a recognition task. Research has indicated

The dual-strategy model of reasoning proposes that people tend to use one of two reasoning strategies: either a statistical or a counterexample strategy, with the latter being more sensitive to potential counterexamples to a given conclusion. Previous studies have examined the effects of reasoning strategy in a variety of contexts. In the present study, we looked at the effects of gist repetition and

Recent studies have examined the role of attention in retaining bound representations in working memory (WM) and found that object-based attention plays a pivotal role. However, no study has investigated whether maintaining bound representations with more features in WM requires extra object-based attention. We investigated this by examining whether a secondary task consuming object-based attention

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01158-1

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01191-0

Humans are highly sensitive to the statistical relationships between features and objects within visual scenes. Inconsistent objects within scenes (e.g., a mailbox in a bedroom) instantly jump out to us and are known to catch our attention. However, it is debated whether such semantic inconsistencies result in boosted memory for the scene, impaired memory, or have no influence on memory. Here, we examined

Focus highlights the fact that contextual alternatives are relevant for the interpretation of an utterance. For example, if someone says: “The meeting is on TUESDAY,” with focus marked by a pitch accent on “Tuesday,” the speaker might want to correct the assumption that the meeting is on Monday (an alternative date). Intonation as one way to signal focus was manipulated in a delayed-recall paradigm

It is well established that humans use self-motion and landmark cues to successfully navigate their environment. Existing research has demonstrated a critical role of the vestibular system in supporting navigation across many species. However, less is known about how vestibular cues interact with landmarks to promote successful navigation in humans. In the present study, we used a motion simulator

Cataphors precede their antecedents, so they cannot be fully interpreted until those antecedents are encountered. Some researchers propose that cataphors trigger an active search during incremental processing in which the parser predictively posits potential antecedents in upcoming syntactic positions (Kazanina et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 56[3], 384–409, 2007). One characteristic of active

Although false memories have largely been examined with the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, little research has focused on the semantic context in which associates are encoded. Across three experiments, we varied semantic context during a sentence-processing task with DRM associates embedded within sentences. More meaningful sentences resulted in greater memory errors (Experiment 1). Furthermore

Many studies suggest that information about past experience, or episodic memory, is divided into discrete units called “events.” Yet we can often remember experiences that span multiple events. Events that occur in close succession might simply be linked because of their proximity to one another, but we can also build links between events that occur farther apart in time. Intuitively, some kind of

Previous research has identified alliteration as a powerful device for investigating implicit memory effects. For example, alliterative phrases can provide retrieval cues that extend to a sublexical level and reactivate previous information that shares alliterative content (Lea et al., Psychological Science, 19[7], 709–716, 2008). But it is an open question if other surface forms might provide similar

This study investigated what academic traits, attitudes, and habits predict individual differences in task-unrelated thought (TUT) during lectures, and whether this TUT propensity mediates associations between academic individual differences and course outcomes (final grade and situational interest evoked by material). Undergraduates (N = 851) from ten psychology classes at two US universities responded

Sequence learning effects in simple perceptual and motor tasks are largely unaffected by normal aging. However, less is known about sequence learning in more complex cognitive tasks that involve attention and memory processes and how this changes with age. In this study, we examined whether incidental and intentional sequence learning would facilitate hybrid visual and memory search in younger and

In visual statistical learning, one can extract the statistical regularities of target locations in an incidental manner. The current study examined the impact of salient perceptual cues on one type of visual statistical learning: probability cueing effects. In a visual search task, the target appeared more often in one quadrant (i.e., rich) than the other quadrants (i.e., sparse). Then, the screen

English sentences with double center-embedded clauses are read faster when they are made ungrammatical by removing one of the required verb phrases. This phenomenon is known as the missing-VP effect. German and Dutch speakers do not experience the missing-VP effect when reading their native language, but they do when reading English as a second language (L2). We investigate whether the missing-VP effect

Memories are encoded in a manner that depends on our knowledge and expectations (“schemas”). Consistent with this, expertise tends to improve memory: Experts have elaborated schemas in their domains of expertise, allowing them to efficiently represent information in this domain (e.g., chess experts have enhanced memory for realistic chess layouts). On the other hand, in most situations, people tend

Recently, researchers have identified word animacy as a strong predictor of recall. In contrast, the method of loci is an ancient mnemonic technique which takes advantage of highly structured encoding and recall processes alongside a strong imagery component to create easily remembered “memory palaces.” The present experiments examine the combined effectiveness of these techniques: Experiment 1 (N

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01177-y

What are the boundaries that limit expansion of semantic knowledge across development? One striking contender is the necessity of a prompt to integrate and self-generate new information. The present research was an investigation of 7- to 9-year-olds’ and 18- to 22-year-olds’ prompted versus unprompted memory integration and subsequent self-derivation of new knowledge. Children and adults (Experiments

In everyday life, recognition decisions often have to be made for multiple objects simultaneously. In contrast, research on recognition memory has predominantly relied on single-item recognition paradigms. We present a first systematic investigation into the cognitive processes that differ between single-word and paired-word tests of recognition memory. In a single-word test, participants categorize

When people experience everyday activities, their comprehension can be shaped by expectations that derive from similar recent experiences, which can affect the encoding of a new experience into memory. When a new experience includes changes—such as a driving route being blocked by construction—this can lead to interference in subsequent memory. One potential mechanism of effective encoding of event

Memory for naturalistic pictures is exceptionally good. However, little is known about people’s ability to monitor the memorability of naturalistic pictures. We report the first systematic investigation into the accuracy and basis of metamemory in this domain. People studied pictures of naturalistic scenes, predicted their chances of recognizing each picture at a later test (judgment of learning, JOL)

Compared to blocked practice, interleaved practice of different tasks leads to superior long-term retention despite poorer initial acquisition performance. This phenomenon, the contextual interference effect, is well documented in various domains but it is not yet clear if it persists in the absence of explicit knowledge in terms of fine motor sequence learning. Additionally, while there is some evidence

According to the item/order hypothesis, high-frequency words are processed more efficiently and therefore order information can be readily encoded. In contrast, low-frequency words are processed less efficiently and the focus on item-specific processing compromises order information. Most experiments testing this account use free recall, which has led to two problems: First, the role of order information

Older adults experience deficits in associative memory. However, age-related differences are reduced when information is consistent with prior knowledge (i.e., schematic support), suggesting that episodic and semantic memory are interrelated. It is unclear what role metacognitive processes play in schematic support. Prior knowledge may reduce encoding demands, but older adults may allocate cognitive

Accessing semantic information has negative consequences for successive recovering attempts of similar information. For instance, in the course of picture-naming tasks, the time required to name an object is determined by the total number of items from the same category that have already been named; naming latencies increase proportionally to the total number of semantically related words named previously

We report two experiments investigating why learners, in making metacognitive judgments, often seem to ignore or otherwise fail to appreciate that feedback following retrieval practice provides a restudy opportunity. Learners practiced word pairs for a final cued-recall test by studying each pair initially, making a judgment of learning (JOL), and then deciding whether to practice the pair again after

Given natural memory limitations, people can generally attend to and remember high-value over low-value information even when cognitive resources are depleted in older age and under divided attention during encoding, representing an important form of cognitive control. In the current study, we examined whether tasks requiring overlapping processing resources may impair the ability to selectively encode

Beginning readers have been shown to be sensitive to the meaning of embedded neighbors (e.g., CROW in CROWN). Moreover, developing readers are sensitive to the morphological structure of words (TEACH-ER). However, the interaction between orthographic and morphological processes in meaning activation during reading is not well established. What determines semantic access to orthographically embedded

People recall and recognize animate words better than inanimate words, perhaps because memory systems were shaped by evolution to prioritize memory for predators, people, and food sources. Attentional paradigms show an animacy advantage that suggests that the animacy advantage in memory stems from a prioritization of animate items when allocating attentional resources during encoding. According to

It is increasingly understood that people may learn new word/object mappings in part via a form of statistical learning in which they track co-occurrences between words and objects across situations (cross-situational learning). Multiple learning processes contribute to this, thought to reflect the simultaneous influence of real-time hypothesis testing and graduate learning. It is unclear how these

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01165-2

Visual word processing has its own dedicated neural system that, due to the novelty of this activity, is unlikely to have acquired its specialization through natural selection. Understanding the properties of this system could shed light on its recruitment and the background of its disorders. Although recognition of simple visual objects is orientation invariant, this is not necessarily the case for

Forster and Lavie (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40[1], 251–260, 2014; Psychological Science, 27[2], 203–212, 2016) found that task-irrelevant distraction correlated positively with a measure of mind-wandering and a report of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptomology. Based primarily on these results, Forster and Lavie claimed to establish an

A key unanswered question about working memory is the nature of interference between items. At one extreme of existing theories, interference occurs between any two items because of a general capacity limit. At another extreme, interference depends on the similarity between particular features of different items. We examine this question in three experiments by presenting two sets of items on each

Statistical regularities in linguistic input, such as transitional probability and phonotactic probability, have been shown to promote speech segmentation. It remains unclear, however, whether or how the combination of transitional probabilities and subtle phonotactic probabilities influence segmentation. The present study provides a fine-grained investigation of the effects of such combined statistics

Effects of prior-task failure (i.e., decreased performance on a target task following failure on a prior task) were tested in young and older adults. Young and older participants (N=120) accomplished a computational estimation task (i.e., providing the best estimates to arithmetic problems) before and after accomplishing a dot comparison task in a control or in a failure condition. Both groups decreased

Previous research has documented that cognitive conflict affects basic cognitive processes such as memory, reasoning, and attention allocation. However, little research has explored whether its effect can be extended to higher cognitive processes such as metacognitive monitoring. The current study took a novel variant of a Stroop task that employed words presented in a color opposite to the color of

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to detect and report a repeated item during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). The RB literature reveals consistent and robust RB for word stimuli, but somewhat variable RB effects for pictorial stimuli. We directly compared RB for object pictures and their word labels, using exactly the same procedure in the same participants. Experiment 1 used a large