Little is explored regarding the modality-specific differences in recall abilities of preschool children. Understanding modality-specific differences in the recall at an early age might give an insight into age-linked trends, which can lay a foundation for later development. The current study used a cross-sectional design to investigate the…

Memory reactivation is a process whereby cueing or recalling a long-term memory makes it enter a new active and labile state. Substantial evidence suggests that during this state the memory can be updated (e.g., adding information) and can become more vulnerable to disruption (e.g., brain insult). Memory reactivations can also prevent memory decay…

Although small children have autobiographical memories, as they grow, they forget its specific details. Although this forgetting is common in early childhood, the presence of effective cues may help recall autobiographical memories. This study examines the effect of verbal and visual cues on the long-term maintenance of a school trip…

Theories of working memory often disagree on the relationships between processing and storage, particularly on how heavily they rely on an attention-based limited resource. Some posit separation and specialization of resources resulting in minimal interference to memory when completing an ongoing processing task, while others argue for a greater…

Sequences of auditory objects such as one-syllable words or brief sounds disrupt serial recall of visually presented targets even when the auditory objects are completely irrelevant for the task at hand. The "token set size effect" is a label for the claim that disruption increases only when moving from a 1-token distractor sequence…

Working memory is critical for learning but has a limited capacity for processing new information in real time. Cognitive load theory is an evidence-based approach to education that seeks to minimize the extraneous (unnecessary) load on working memory to avoid overloading it. The "seductive details effect" postulates that extraneous load…

A central goal of research on short-term memory (STM) over the past 2 decades has been to identify the mechanisms that underpin the representation of serial order, and to establish whether these mechanisms are the same across different modalities and domains (e.g., verbal, visual, spatial). A fruitful approach to addressing this question has…

Purpose: Children and early adolescents seem to have an advantage over adults in acquiring nonnative speech sounds, supported by evidence showing that earlier age of acquisition strongly predicts second language attainment. Although many factors influence children's ultimate success in language learning, it is unknown whether children rely on…

Recalling specific past experiences is critical for most formal social interactions, including when being interviewed for employment, as a witness or defendant in the criminal justice system, or as a patient during a clinical consultation. Such interviews can be difficult for autistic adults under standard open questioning, yet applied research…

Mental schemas provide a framework into which new information can easily be integrated. In a series of experiments, we examined how incongruence that stems from a prediction error modulates memory for multicomponent events that instantiated preexisting schemas as noted in a previous study. Each event consisted of four stimulus pairs with…

Three experiments explored how well children recognize events from different types of visual experience: either by directly seeing an event or by indirectly experiencing it from post-event visual evidence. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5- to 6-year-old Turkish-speaking children (n = 32) successfully recognized events through either direct or indirect…

Provided stimuli are highly distinct, the detection of changes between two briefly separated arrays appears to be achieved by an all-or-none process where either the relevant information is in working memory or observers guess. This observation suggests that it is possible to estimate the average number of items an observer was able to retain…

Working memory (WM) enables a rapid access to a limited number of items that are no longer physically present. WM studies usually involve the encoding and retention of multiple items, while probing a single item only. Hence, little is known about how well multiple items can be reported from WM. Here we asked participants to successively report…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to test whether a group of older postlingually deafened cochlear implant users (OCIs) use similar verbal memory strategies to those used by older normal-hearing adults (ONHs). Verbal memory functioning was assessed in the visual and auditory modalities separately, enabling us to eliminate possible modality-based…

In 2 experiments, participants were presented with lists of between 2 and 12 words for either immediate free recall (IFR) or immediate serial recall (ISR). Auditory recall advantages at the end of the list (modality effects) and visual recall advantages early in the list (inverse modality effects) were observed in both tasks and the extent and…