Involuntary musical imagery (INMI; more commonly known as "earworms" or having a song "stuck in your head") is a common musical phenomenon and one of the most salient examples of spontaneous cognition. Despite the ubiquitous nature of INMI in the general population, functional roles of INMI remain to be fully established and…

We examined whether the position of modifiers in English influences how words are encoded and subsequently retrieved from memory. Compared with premodifiers, postmodifiers might confer more perceptual significance to the associated head nouns, are more consistent with the "given-before-new" information structure, and might also be easier…

The Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, 2nd Edition (CTOPP-2; Wagner et al., 2013) is commonly used in k-12 public schools to assess basic cognitive processing skills foundational for reading achievement. Psychometric support for its use with dual language learners (DLLs), a group representing over 10% of the school-aged population in…

How does the concurrent use of language affect perception and memory for exemplars? Labels cue more general category information than a specific exemplar. Applying labels can affect the resulting memory for an exemplar. Here 3 alternative hypotheses are proposed for the role of labeling an exemplar at encoding: (a) labels distort memory toward the…

Background: Whereas research has indicated that children with Down syndrome (DS) imitate demonstrated actions over short delays, it is presently unknown whether children with DS recall information over lengthy delays at levels comparable with typically developing (TD) children matched on developmental age. Method: In the present research, 10…

It is often assumed that recollection is necessary to support memory for novel associations, whereas familiarity supports memory for single items. However, the levels of unitization framework assumes that familiarity can support associative memory under conditions in which the components of an association are unitized (i.e., treated as a single…

Does correctly answering a test question about a multiterm fact enhance memory for the entire fact? We explored that issue in 4 experiments. Subjects first studied Advanced Placement History or Biology facts. Half of those facts were then restudied, whereas the remainder were tested using "5 W" (i.e., "who, what, when, where",…

A prominent finding in recognition memory is that studied items are associated with more variability in memory strength than new items. Here, we test 3 competing theories for why this occurs--the "encoding variability," "attention failure", and "recollection" accounts. Distinguishing among these theories is critical…

Research examining the importance of surface-level information to familiarity in recognition memory tasks is mixed: Sometimes it affects recognition and sometimes it does not. One potential explanation of the inconsistent findings comes from the ideas of dual process theory of recognition and the transfer-appropriate processing framework, which…

The link between emotion regulation and academic achievement is well documented. Less is known about specific emotion regulation strategies that promote learning. Six- to 13-year-olds ("N" = 126) viewed a sad film and were instructed to reappraise the importance, reappraise the outcome, or ruminate about the sad events; another group…

Literature on auditory distraction has generally focused on the effects of particular kinds of sounds on attention to target stimuli. In support of extensive previous findings that have demonstrated the special role of language as an auditory distractor, we found that a concurrent speech stream impaired recall of a short lecture, especially for…

The false memory effect produced by the Deese/Roediger & McDermott (DRM) paradigm is reportedly impervious to warnings to avoid false alarming to the critical lures (D. A. Gallo, H. L. Roediger III, & K. B. McDermott, 2001). This finding has been used as strong evidence against models that attribute the false alarms to a decision…

Research on how individuals monitor their level of comprehension during study paints a picture of learners as being insensitive to many of the factors or conditions of learning that can enhance long-term retention and transfer. In previous research, however, deWinstanley and Bjork (2004) demonstrated that learners--if made sensitive to the…

Recollection has long been thought to play a key role in associative recognition tasks. Evidence that associative recollection might be a threshold process has come from analyses of the associative recognition receiver operating characteristic (ROC). Specifically, the ROC is not as curvilinear as a signal detection theory requires. In addition,…