Past research indicates that people judge repeated statements as more true than new ones. An experiential consequence of repetition that may underly this "truth effect" is processing fluency: Processing statements feels easier following their repetition. In three preregistered experiments (N = 684), we examined the effect of merely…

Dual-process theories of memory assume that memory is based on recollection and familiarity. A few dual-process approaches to metacognition have been proposed, which assume that metacognitive judgments, including judgments of learning (JOLs) or predictions about the likelihood of recall, are based on two, or slow and fast, processes. Prior…

Integrating evidence from multiple sources to guide decisions is something humans do on a daily basis. Existing research suggests that not all sources of information are weighted equally in decision-making tasks, and that observers are subject to biases in the face of internal and external noise. Here we describe two experiments that measured…

Contemporary theories of decision-making are compared with respect to their predictions about the judgments that are hypothesized to underlie risky choice framing effects. Specifically, we compare predictions of psychophysical models, such as prospect theory, to the cognitive representational approach of fuzzy-trace theory in which the presence or…

The theory of mental models postulates that conditionals and disjunctions refer to possibilities, real or counterfactual. Factual conditionals, for example, "If there's an apple, there's a pear," parallel counterfactual ones, for example, "If there had been an apple, there would have been a pear." A similar parallel underlies…

Do we structure object-related conceptual information according to real-world sensorimotor experience, or can it also be shaped by linguistic information? This study investigates whether a feature of language coded in grammar--numeral classifiers--affects the conceptual representation of objects. We compared speakers of Mandarin (a classifier…

Ongoing discussions on the nature of storage in visual working memory have mostly focused on 2 theoretical accounts: On one hand we have a discrete-state account, postulating that information in working memory is supported with high fidelity for a limited number of discrete items by a given number of "slots," with no information being…

During recognition memory decisions, external hints or cues alter the accuracy and confidence of correct rejections (valid > uncued > invalid). In contrast, although hits show analogous accuracy effects, hit confidence remains largely unaffected by cue validity. Prior research suggested this confidence validity dissociation (CVD) may depend…

In evaluative conditioning, if one shape (conditional stimulus [CS]; CSp) is paired with pleasant unconditional stimulus (US) images and another (CSu) is paired with unpleasant US images differential CS valence and US expectancy develops, such that participants evaluate the CSp as more pleasant and more predictive of pleasant images than the CSu.…

Students learn more effectively through repeated retrieval of study materials relative to repeated exposure to the materials, a phenomenon known as the "testing effect" or "retrieval practice". This pattern has been demonstrated repeatedly with verbal materials, and more recently with visuospatial materials. The extent to which…

Going beyond the origins of cognitive biases, which have been the focus of continued research, the notion of metacognitive myopia refers to the failure to monitor, control, and correct for biased inferences at the metacognitive level. Judgments often follow the given information uncritically, even when it is easy to find out or explicitly…

We consider the proposition that reasoners represent causal conditionals such as "if John studies hard, he will do well in the test" as a causal model in which the antecedent ("John studies hard") is a potential cause of the consequent ("John does well in the test"). Some studies suggest that reasoners ignore…

People's expectations help them make judgments about the world. In the area of spatial memory, the interaction of existing knowledge with incoming information is best illustrated in the category effect, a bias in positioning a target toward the prototypical location of its region (Huttenlocher et al., 1991). According to Bayesian principles, these…

When people judge the duration of stimuli, judgments are influenced by the physical size of these stimuli. Specifically, people tend to judge the duration of large stimuli longer than the duration of small stimuli. However, some authors (Bottini & Casasanto, 2010; Ma, Yang, & Zhang, 2012) have reported that even implicit size can affect…

In recognition memory, anything that is objectively new is necessarily not-old, and anything that is objectively old is necessarily not-new. Therefore, judging whether a test item is new is logically equivalent to judging whether it is old, and conversely. Nevertheless, a series of 10 experiments showed that old? and new? judgments did not produce…