A controversial issue in anaphoric processing has been whether processing preferences of anaphoric expressions are affected by the antecedent's grammatical role or surface position. Using eye tracking, Experiment 1 examined the comprehension of pronouns during reading, which revealed shorter reading times in the pronoun region and later regions…

The human visual system receives more information than can be consciously processed. To overcome this capacity limit, we employ attentional mechanisms to prioritize task-relevant (target) information over less relevant (distractor) information. Regularities in the environment can facilitate the allocation of attention, as demonstrated by the…

Object-substitution masking (OSM) occurs when a mask, such as four dots that surround a brief target item, onsets simultaneously with the target and offsets a short time after the target, rather than simultaneously with it. OSM is a reduction in accuracy of reporting the target with the temporally trailing mask, compared with the simultaneously…

In many task-switch studies, task sequence and response sequence interact: Response repetitions produce benefits when the task repeats but produce costs when the task switches. Four different theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain these effects: a reconfiguration-based account, association-learning models, an episodic-retrieval…

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…

The ability to adjust bias, or preference for an option, allows for great behavioral flexibility. Decision bias is also important for understanding cognition as it can provide useful information about underlying cognitive processes. Previous work suggests that bias can be adjusted in 2 primary ways: by adjusting how the stimulus under…

Affective evaluations of previously ignored visual stimuli are more negative than those of novel items or prior targets of attention or response. This has been taken as evidence that inhibition has negative affective consequences. But inhibition could act instead to attenuate or "neutralize" preexisting affective salience, predicting opposite…

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is the finding of impaired memory performance for information stored in long-term memory due to retrieval of a related set of information. This phenomenon is often assigned to operations of a specialized mechanism recruited to resolve interference during retrieval by deactivating competing memory representations.…

The "word frequency paradox" refers to the finding that low frequency words are better recognized than high frequency words yet high frequency words are better recalled than low frequency words. Rather than comparing separate groups of low and high frequency words, we sought to quantify the functional relation between word frequency and…

Updating and maintenance of information are 2 conflicting demands on working memory (WM). We examined the time required to update WM (updating latency) as a function of the sequence of updated and not-updated items within a list. Participants held a list of items in WM and updated a variable subset of them in each trial. Four experiments that vary…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

Psycholinguistic research spanning a number of decades has produced diverging results with regard to the nature of constraint integration in online sentence processing. For example, evidence that language users anticipatorily fixate likely upcoming referents in advance of evidence in the speech signal supports rapid context integration. By…

Doctors often make decisions for their patients and predict their patients' preferences and decisions to customize advice to their particular situation. We investigated how doctors make decisions about medical treatments for their patients and themselves and how they predict their patients' decisions. We also studied whether these decisions and…

The current study addressed the role of switch detection in cognitive flexibility by testing the effect of transition cues (i.e., cues that directly signal the need to switch or maintain a given task goal) in a cued set-shifting paradigm at 5 years of age. Children performed better, especially on switch trials, when transition cues were combined…

Rating the relevance of words for the imagined situation of being stranded in the grasslands without survival material leads to exceptionally good memory for these words. This survival processing effect has received much attention because it promises to elucidate the evolutionary foundations of memory. However, the proximate mechanisms of the…