The Q-diffusion model is a cognitive process model that considers decision making as an unobservable information accumulation process. Both item and person parameters decide the trace line of the cognitive process, which further decides observed response and response time. Because the likelihood function for the Q-diffusion model is intractable,…

For nearly half a century now, Garner interference has been serving as the gold standard measure of dimensional interaction and selective attention. But the mechanisms that generate Garner interference are still not well understood. The current study proposes a novel theory that ascribes the interference (and dimensional interaction in general) to…

Knowing what one knows and accurately monitoring one's own capacities and performance on a moment-to-moment basis are important determinants of task success. Individual differences in such metacognitive monitoring are well documented, but what determines an individual's monitoring accuracy in a particular context is yet to be fully understood. One…

Existing research shows that the order in which evidence arrives can bias its evaluation and the resulting decision in favor of information encountered early on. We used eye-tracking to study the underlying cognitive mechanisms in the context of incentivized financial choices based on real world market data. Subjects learned about the…

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…

The development of visual expertise is accompanied by enhanced visual object recognition memory within an expert domain. We aimed to understand the relationship between expertise and memory by modeling cognitive mechanisms. Participants with a measured range of birding expertise were recruited and tested on memory for birds (expert domain) and…

There is much evidence that the prospect of reward modulates cognitive control in terms of more stable behavior. Increases in expected reward magnitude, however, have been suggested to increase flexible behavior as evidenced by reduced switch costs. In a series of experiments, the authors provide evidence that this increased cognitive flexibility…

How does orthographic distinctiveness affect recall of structured (categorized) word lists? On one theory, enhanced item-specific information (e.g., more distinct encoding) in concert with robust relational information (e.g., categorical information) optimally supports free recall. This predicts that for categorically structured lists,…

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,…

The experiments reported here were designed to replicate and extend McCabe, Roediger, and Karpicke's (2011) finding that retrieval in category cued recall involves both controlled and automatic processes. The extension entailed identifying whether distinctive encoding affected 1 or both of these 2 processes. The first experiment successfully…

Within phenomenological philosophy four topics, (1) Body, (2) Time, (3) Others and the Social Order and (4) World serve as the major contexts in which human perception, action and reflection take place. At present only three of these domains have been studied from an empirical perspective, leaving Body as the one domain requiring further analysis.…

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…

This study sought to determine whether nonselective retrieval practice after study can reduce memories' susceptibility to intralist interference, as it is observed in the list-length effect, output interference, and retrieval-induced forgetting. Across 3 experiments, we compared the effects of nonselective retrieval practice and restudy on…

Unlike other animals, humans have the unique ability to share and use verbal instructions to prepare for upcoming tasks. Recent research showed that instructions are sufficient for the automatic, reflex-like activation of responses. However, systematic studies into the limits of these automatic effects of task instructions remain relatively…