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…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

In task switching, a common result supporting the notion of inhibitory processes as a determinant of switch costs is the occurrence of "n"-2 repetition costs. Evidence suggests that this effect is not affected by preparation. However, the role of preparation on preceding trials has been neglected so far. In this study, evidence for an…

Evidence suggests that people with autism rely less on holistic visual information than typical adults. The current studies examine this by investigating core visual processes that contribute to holistic processing--namely, individuation and element grouping--and how they develop in participants with autism and typically developing (TD)…

Two studies are presented that explored the effects of experimental manipulations on the quality and accessibility of autobiographical memories in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), relative to a typical comparison group matched for age, gender and IQ. Both studies found that the adults with ASD generated fewer specific memories than the…

Previous research has demonstrated that people preferentially remember reputational information that is emotionally incongruent to their expectations, but it has left open the question of the generality of this effect. Three conflicting hypotheses were proposed: (a) The effect is restricted to information relevant to reciprocal social exchange.…

That objective reference is necessary for formation of reliable beliefs about the external world is almost axiomatic. However, Condorcet (1785) suggested that purely subjective information--if shared and combined via social interaction--is enough for accurate understanding of the external world. We asked if social interaction and objective…

The authors examined the evolution of cognitive and emotional responses to terror risks for a nationally representative sample of Americans between late 2001 and late 2002. Respondents' risk judgments changed in ways consistent with their reported personal experiences. However, they did not recognize these changes, producing hindsight bias in…

Verbal overshadowing reflects the impairment in memory performance following verbalization of nonverbal stimuli. However, it is not clear whether the same mechanisms are responsible for verbal overshadowing effects observed with different stimuli and task demands. In the present article, we propose a multiprocess view that reconciles the main…

The delayed discrimination methodology has been used to demonstrate a high-fidelity nondecaying visual short-term memory (VSTM) for so-called preattentive basic features. In the current Study, I show that the nondecaying high VSTM precision is not restricted to basic features by using the same method to measure memory precision for gait direction…

Mariners actively adjust their body orientation in response to ship motion. On a ship at sea, we evaluated relations between standing postural activity and the performance of a precision aiming task. Standing participants (experienced mariners) maintained the beam from a handheld laser on a target. Targets were large or small, thereby varying the…

Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. In Experiment 1, while seated and then when walking on a treadmill, adults completed Guilford's alternate uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking and the compound remote associates (CRA) test of convergent thinking. Walking increased 81% of…

In three experiments, we investigated the role of automatic and controlled inhibitory retrieval processes in true and false memory development in children and adults. Experiment 1 incorporated a directed forgetting task to examine controlled retrieval inhibition. Experiments 2 and 3 used a part-set cue and retrieval practice task to examine…

The present study examined the impact of divided attention on children's and adults' neutral and negative true and false memories in a standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Children (7- and 11-year-olds; n = 126) and adults (n = 52) received 5 neutral and 5 negative Deese/Roediger-McDermott word lists; half of each group also received a…

Adults ask children questions in a variety of contexts, for example, in the classroom, in the forensic context, or in experimental research. In such situations children will inevitably be asked some questions to which they do not know the answer, because they do not have the required information ("unanswerable" questions). When asked unanswerable…