For over 40 years, the contextual interference effect in motor learning has been investigated. While the difference between levels of contextual interference experienced under blocked and random practice are well established, the difference in the levels of contextual interference experienced under serial and random practice is still ambiguous.…

Three experiments examined the immediate free recall (IFR) of auditory-verbal and visuospatial materials from single-modality and dual-modality lists. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with between 1 and 16 spoken words, with between 1 and 16 visuospatial dot locations, or with between 1 and 16 words "and" dots with synchronized…

The role of memory in behavioral distraction by auditory attentional capture was investigated: We examined whether capture is a product of the novelty of the capturing event (i.e., the absence of a recent memory for the event) or its violation of learned expectancies on the basis of a memory for an event structure. Attentional capture--indicated…

The present experiments examined perceptual specificity effects using a rereading paradigm. Eye movements were monitored while participants read the same target word twice, in two different low-constraint sentence frames. The congruency of perceptual processing was manipulated by either presenting the target word in the same distortion typography…

The behavioural phenotype of velocardiofacial syndrome (VCFS), one of the most common human multiple anomaly syndromes, includes developmental disabilities, frequently including intellectual disability (ID) and high risk of diagnosis of psychotic disorders including schizophrenia. VCFS may offer a model of the relationship between ID and risk of…

Nonhuman animals, like humans, appear sensitive to the structure of the elements of sequences, perhaps even when the structure relates nonadjacent elements. In the present study, we examined the contribution of chunking, rule learning, and item memory when rats learned serial patterns composed of two interleaved subpatterns. In one group, the…

In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the effects of to-be-remembered (TBR) and intervening list length on free recall to determine whether selective rehearsal could explain the previous finding that recall was affected only by TBR list length. In Experiments 1 (covert rehearsal) and 2 (overt rehearsal), participants saw 5- and 20-word lists…

Background: In the last few years, experimental data have been reported on differences in implicit memory processes of genetically distinct groups of individuals with Intellectual Disability (ID). These evidences are relevant for the more general debate on supposed asynchrony of cognitive maturation in children with abnormal brain development.…

The present research examined self-reported rehearsal processes in naturalistic time-based prospective memory tasks (Study 1 and 2) and compared them with the processes in event-based tasks (Study 3). Participants had to remember to phone the experimenter either at a prearranged time (a time-based task) or after receiving a certain text message…

The buffer model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin gives a valid measure of primary-memory capacity (i.e., the estimate is close to the true value), a property lacking in both the original Waugh and Norman method and Watkins' modifications of that method. (Author/PN)

The ability of preschool children to construct and reconstruct ordered sequences was examined in a series of four experiments. Subjects were 42 children aged 3 to 5 years. The conditions under which reconstruction of an arbitrary series of events is possible are described. (Author/GO)