Successful recognition is generally thought to be based on both recollection and familiarity of studied information. Recent studies found that making judgments of learning (JOLs) can reactively facilitate recognition performance, a form of reactivity effect on memory. The current study aimed to explore the roles of recollection and familiarity in…

In word learning, learners need to identify the referent of words by leveraging the fact that the same word may co-occur with different sets of objects. This raises the question, what do children remember from "in the moment" that they can use for cross-situational learning? Furthermore, do children represent pictures of familiar animals…

Responses are slower in two-choice tasks when either a previous stimulus feature or the previous response repeats than when all features repeat or all features change. Current views of action control posit that such partial repetition costs (PRCs) index the time to update a prior "binding" between a stimulus feature and the response or…

This study examines declarative memory retrieval in ASD depending on the availability and access to stored conceptual knowledge. Fifteen autistic participants and a matched control group of 18 typically-developed (TD) volunteers completed a Remember-Know paradigm manipulated by encoding-type (categorical, perceptual) and item-typicality…

Iconicity is a relationship of resemblance between the form and meaning of a sign. Compelling evidence from diverse areas of the cognitive sciences suggests that iconicity plays a pivotal role in the processing, memory, learning, and evolution of both spoken and signed language, indicating that iconicity is a general property of language. However,…

Metaphor generation is both a creative act and a means of learning. When learning a new concept, people often create a metaphor to connect the new concept to existing knowledge. Does the manner in which people generate a metaphor, via sudden insight (Aha! moment) or deliberate analysis, influence the quality of generation and subsequent learning…

Based on the classic distinction between semantic and episodic memory, people answer general-knowledge questions by querying their semantic memory. And yet, an appeal of trivia games is the variety of memory experiences they arouse--including the recollection of episodic details. We report the first in-depth exploration of the memory states that…

Lexical ERPs (event-related potentials) obtained in an oddball paradigm were suggested to be an index of the formation of new word representations in the brain in the learning process: with increased exposure to new lexemes, the ERP amplitude grows, which is interpreted as a signature of a new memory-trace build-up and activation. Previous…

Repeated or prolonged exposure to an odorant without any positive or negative reinforcement produces experience-dependent plasticity, which results in habituation and latent inhibition. In the honeybee ("Apis mellifera"), it has been demonstrated that, even if the absolute neural representation of an odor in the primary olfactory center,…

Response time variability and its changes over time have been interpreted as indicative of levels of knowledge automatization. Predominantly, only declines in variability have been examined over the course of practice and growing second language proficiency. We discuss possible scenarios that may involve increasing, rather than declining…

Are associative memories forgotten more quickly than item memories, and does the level of original learning differentially influence forgetting rates? In this study, we addressed these questions by having participants learn single words and word pairs once (Experiment 1), three times (Experiment 2), and six times (Experiment 3) in a massed…

People tend to show better memory for information that is deemed valuable or important. By one mechanism, individuals selectively engage deeper, semantic encoding strategies for high value items (Cohen, Rissman, Suthana, Castel, & Knowlton, 2014). By another mechanism, information paired with value or reward is automatically strengthened in…

Increasing the number of study trials creates a crossover pattern in source memory zROC slopes; that is, the slope is either below or above 1 depending on which source receives stronger learning. This pattern can be produced if additional learning affects memory processes such as the relative contribution of recollection and familiarity to source…

Despite many years of investigation into implicit learning in nonlinguistic domains, the potential for implicit learning to deliver the kinds of generalizations that underlie natural language competence remains unclear. In a series of experiments, we investigated implicit learning of the semantic preferences of novel verbs, specifically, whether…

Six-month-old infants' ("N" = 168) memory for individual items in a categorized list (e.g., images of dogs or cats) was examined to investigate the interactions between visual recognition memory, working memory, and categorization. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with six different cats or dogs, presented one at a time…