Stimulus-response binding and retrieval (SRBR) is a fundamental mechanism driving behavior automatization. In five experiments, we investigated the modulatory role of affective consequences (AC) on SRBR effects to test whether binding/retrieval can explain instrumental learning (i.e., the "law of effect"). SRBR effects were assessed in a…

In this article, we assess an alternative account of a key experimental pattern thought to index top-down control. The list-wide proportion congruence effect is the well-documented pattern whereby the congruency effect (i.e., Stroop effect) is attenuated in lists containing mostly incongruent trials relative to lists containing mostly congruent…

Mounting evidence suggests that monetary reward induces an incidentally learned selection bias toward highly rewarded features. It remains controversial, however, whether learning of reward regularities has similar effects on spatial attention. Here we ask whether spatial biases toward highly rewarded locations are learned implicitly, or are…

The relation between mental imagery and visual perception is a long debated topic in experimental psychology. In a recent study, Wantz, Borst, Mast, and Lobmaier (2015) demonstrated that color imagery could benefit color perception in a task that involved generating imagery in response to a cue prior to a forced-choice color discrimination task.…

Attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015, 2016) demonstrates that we may not always be able to spontaneously retrieve a simple attribute of a visual object (e.g., its color) for conscious report, even though the object had just been the target in a visual task. Attribute amnesia has been suggested to reflect a lack of consolidation of the…

A frequent observation in dual-task studies is the backward crosstalk effect (BCE), meaning that aspects of a secondary Task 2 influence Task 1 performance. Up to this point, 2 major types of the BCE were investigated: a BCE based on dimensional overlap between both stimuli and/or responses (the compatibility-based BCE), and a BCE based on whether…

In recognition memory, "recollection" is defined as retrieval of the context associated with an event, whereas "familiarity" is defined as retrieval based on item strength alone. Recent studies have shown that conventional recollection-based tasks, in which context details are manipulated for source memory assessment at test,…

In 2 variants of the color-word Stroop task, we compared 5 types of color-neutral distractors--real words (e.g., "HAT"), pseudowords (e.g., "HIX"), consonant strings (e.g., "HDK"), symbol strings (e.g., #$%), and a row of Xs (e.g., "XXX")--as well as incongruent color words (e.g., "GREEN" displayed…

Seven experiments tested, whether when naming a colored object (e.g., "CAR"), its color (e.g., "red") is phonologically encoded. In the first experiment, adults had to say aloud the names of colored line drawings of objects that were each displayed among 3 black-and-white line drawings (Experiment 1a) or that were presented…

Joint attention--the mutual focus of 2 individuals on an item--speeds detection and discrimination of target information. However, what happens to that information beyond the initial perceptual episode? To fully comprehend and engage with our immediate environment also requires working memory (WM), which integrates information from second to…

Here we examine a new task to assess working memory for visual arrays in which the participant must judge how many items changed from a studied array to a test array. As a clue to processing, on some trials in the first 2 experiments, participants carried out a metamemory judgment in which they were to decide how many items were in working memory.…

Reading fluency is often predicted by rapid automatized naming (RAN) speed, which as the name implies, measures the automaticity with which familiar stimuli (e.g., letters) can be retrieved and named. Readers with dyslexia are considered to have less "automatized" access to lexical information, reflected in longer RAN times compared with…