In prospective memory (PM) research, costs (slowed responding to the ongoing task when a PM task is present relative to when it is not) have typically been interpreted as implicating an attentionally demanding monitoring process. To inform this interpretation, Heathcote, Loft, and Remington (2015), using an accumulator model, found that PM-related…

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,…

Repeating an item in a list benefits recall performance, and this benefit increases when the repetitions are spaced apart (Madigan, 1969; Melton, 1970). Retrieved context theory incorporates 2 mechanisms that account for these effects: contextual variability and study-phase retrieval. Specifically, if an item presented at position "i" is…

People often use what they know as a basis to estimate what others know. This egocentrism can bias their estimates of others' knowledge. In 2 experiments, we examined whether people can diminish egocentrism when predicting for others. Participants answered general knowledge questions and then estimated how many of their peers would know the…

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.…

In 7 experiments, we explored the role of retrieval in associative updating, that is, in incorporating new information into an associative memory. We tested the hypothesis that retrieval would facilitate incorporating a new contextual detail into a learned association. Participants learned 3 pieces of information--a person's face, name, and…

To investigate bilingual language control, prior language switching studies presented visual objects, which had to be named in different languages, typically indicated by a visual cue. The present study examined language switching of predictable responses by introducing a novel sequence-based language switching paradigm. In 4 experiments,…

The goal of this study was to evaluate the claim that young children display preferences for auditory stimuli over visual stimuli. This study was motivated by concerns that the visual stimuli employed in prior studies were considerably more complex and less distinctive than the competing auditory stimuli, resulting in an illusory preference for…

This study investigates whether a rhythm can orient attention to specific moments enhancing people's reaction times (RT). We used a modified version of the temporal orienting paradigm in which an auditory isochronous rhythm was presented prior to an auditory single target. The rhythm could have a fast pace (450 ms Inter-Onset-Interval or IOI) or a…

We report how the trajectories of saccadic eye movements are affected by memory interference acquired during associative learning. Human participants learned to perform saccadic choice responses based on the presentation of arbitrary central cues A, B, AC, BC, AX, BY, X, and Y that were trained to predict the appearance of a peripheral target…

Several studies have demonstrated that as listeners hear sentences describing events in a scene, their eye movements anticipate upcoming linguistic items predicted by the unfolding relationship between scene and sentence. While this may reflect active prediction based on structural or contextual expectations, the influence of local thematic…

In order to examine metacognitive accuracy (i.e., the relationship between metacognitive judgment and memory performance), researchers often rely on by-participant analysis, where metacognitive accuracy (e.g., resolution, as measured by the gamma coefficient or signal detection measures) is computed for each participant and the computed values are…

The output of binary cuing systems, such as alerts or alarms, depends on the threshold setting--a parameter that is often user-adjustable. However, it is unknown if users are able to adequately adjust thresholds and what information may help them to do so. Two experiments tested threshold settings for a binary classification task based on binary…

A skew in the base rate of upcoming events can often provide a better cue for accurate predictions than a contingency between signals and events. The authors study prediction behavior and test people's sensitivity to both base rate and contingency; they also examine people's ability to compare the benefits of both for prediction. They formalize…

Voluntary action can be studied by giving participants free choice over which task to perform in response to each presented stimulus. In such experiments, performance costs are observed when participants choose to switch tasks from the previous trial. It has been proposed that these costs primarily index the time-consuming operation of top-down…