A classic issue in the cognitive psychology of human category learning has involved the contrast between exemplar and prototype models. However, experimental tests to distinguish the models have relied almost solely on use of artificially-constructed categories composed of simplified stimuli. Here we contrast the predictions from the models in a…

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…

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…

The recognition heuristic (RH) theory predicts that, in comparative judgment tasks, if one object is recognized and the other is not, the recognized one is chosen. The memory-state heuristic (MSH) extends the RH by assuming that choices are not affected by recognition judgments per se, but by the memory states underlying these judgments (i.e.,…

Readers tend to skip words, particularly when they are short, frequent, or predictable. Angele and Rayner (2013) recently reported that readers are often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision. In the present study, we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates…

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…

Judging whether multiple events will co-occur is an important aspect of everyday decision making. The underlying probabilities of occurrence are usually unknown and have to be inferred from experience. Using a rigorous, quantitative model comparison, we investigate how people judge the conjunctive probabilities of multiple events to co-occur. In 2…

We tested the dual process and unequal variance signal detection models by jointly modeling recognition and source confidence ratings. The 2 approaches make unique predictions for the slope of the recognition memory zROC function for items with correct versus incorrect source decisions. The standard bivariate Gaussian version of the unequal…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

Adults make erroneous predictions about object fall despite recognizing when observed displays are correct or incorrect. Prediction requires explicit engagement with conceptual knowledge, whereas recognition can be achieved through tacit processing. Therefore, it has been suggested that the greater challenge imposed by explicit engagement leads to…

The capacity of short-term memory is a key constraint when people make online judgments requiring them to rely on samples retrieved from memory (e.g., Dougherty & Hunter, 2003). In this article, the authors compare 2 accounts of how people use knowledge of statistical distributions to make point estimates: either by retrieving precomputed…

A robust anomaly in intertemporal choice is the delay-speedup asymmetry: Receipts are discounted more, and payments are discounted less, when delayed than when expedited over the same interval. We developed 2 versions of the tradeoff model (Scholten & Read, 2010) to address such situations, in which an outcome is expected at a given time but…

The slope of the z-transformed receiver-operating characteristic (zROC) in recognition memory experiments is usually less than 1, which has long been interpreted to mean that the variance of the target distribution is greater than the variance of the lure distribution. The greater variance of the target distribution could arise because the…

Linguistic labels affect inductive generalization; however, the mechanism underlying these effects remains unclear. According to one similarity-based model, SINC (similarity, induction, naming, and categorization), early in development labels are features of objects contributing to the overall similarity of compared entities, with early induction…

An important question in research on eye movements in reading is whether word frequency and word predictability have additive or interactive effects on fixation durations. A fair number of studies have reported only additive effects of the frequency and predictability of a target word on reading times on that word, failing to show significant…