Humans can rapidly extract object and category information from an image despite surprising limitations in detecting changes to the individual parts of that image. In this article we provide evidence that the construction of a perceptual whole, or Gestalt, reduces awareness of changes to the parts of this object. This result suggests that the…

Memory for emotional events is usually very good even when tested shortly after study, before it is altered by the influence of emotional arousal on consolidation. Immediate emotion-enhanced memory may stem from the influence of emotion on cognitive processes at encoding and retrieval. Our goal was to test which cognitive factors are necessary and…

Participants studied category-exemplar pairs ("FRUIT Cherry," "FRUIT Grape") and then practiced some of the items ("Cherry"). In Experiment 1, practice that involved retrieving the item from memory suppressed recall of related items ("Grape"), a finding known as the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) effect.…

Diminished episodic memory and diminished use of semantic information to aid recall by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are both thought to result from diminished relational binding of elements of complex stimuli. To test this hypothesis, we asked high-functioning adults with ASD and typical comparison participants to study grids in…

The aim of this study was to investigate verbal and nonverbal cognitive deficits in Italian students with developmental dyslexia. The performances of 32 dyslexic students, 64 age-matched typically reading controls, and 64 reading age-matched controls were compared on tests of lexical knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming,…

Multimodal composing is part of the Common Core vision of the twenty-first-century student. Two descriptive studies were conducted of fifth-grade students' digital folktale retellings. Study 1 analyzed 83 retellings in relation to the types and frequencies of modal use, such as image, sound, movement, and written text, as well as their retelling…

Working memory is typically defined as a system devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and processing of information. However, the interplay between these 2 functions is still a matter of debate in the literature, with views ranging from complete independence to complete dependence. The time-based resource-sharing model assumes that a central…

We examined the contribution of the phonological loop to immediate free recall (IFR) and immediate serial recall (ISR) of lists of between one and 15 words. Following Baddeley (1986, 2000, 2007, 2012), we assumed that visual words could be recoded into the phonological store when presented silently but that recoding would be prevented by…

With teachers taking more interest in utilizing 3D virtual environments for educational purposes, research is needed to understand how learners perceive and process information within virtual environments (Eschenbrenner, Nah, & Siau, 2008). In this study, the authors sought to determine if learning style or digital literacy predict incidental…

In what ways do native language (NL) speakers and foreign language (FL) learners differ in understanding the same messages delivered with or without gestures? To answer this question, seventh- and eighth-grade NL and FL learners of English in the United States and Norway were shown a video of a speaker describing, in English, a cartoon image that…

When body movements are stored in memory in an organized manner, linked to a common retrieval cue like the effector with which to execute the movement, interference may arise as soon as one initiates the execution of a specific body movement in the presence of the retrieval cue because related motor programs also are activated. We investigated the…

The role of experience in memory, specifically the word frequency (WF) mirror effect showing higher hit rates and lower false alarm rates for low-frequency words, is one of the hallmarks of memory. However, this "regularity of memory" is limited because normative WF has been treated as discrete (low vs. high). We evaluate the extent to…

Background and Design: In recent years, evidence has emerged that suggests specific language impairment (SLI) does not exclusively affect linguistic skill. Studies have revealed memory difficulties, including those measured using nonverbal tasks. However, there has been relatively little research into the nature of the verbal/nonverbal boundaries…

Psychological research suggests that foreign-language vocabulary acquisition recruits the phonological loop for verbal working memory. To depict the neural underpinnings and shed light on the process of foreign language learning, we conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging of Japanese participants without previous exposure to the Uzbek…

Study stimuli presented at the same time as unrelated targets in a detection task are better remembered than stimuli presented with distractors. This attentional boost effect (ABE) has been found with pictorial (Swallow & Jiang, 2010) and more recently verbal materials (Spataro, Mulligan, & Rossi-Arnaud, 2013). The present experiments…