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…

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…

Psychological research has placed great emphasis on inhibitory control due to its integral role in normal cognition and clinical disorders. The stop-signal task and associated measure--stop-signal reaction time (SSRT)--provides a well-established paradigm for measuring response inhibition. However, motivational influences on stop-signal…

The authors conducted 2 experiments to assess how phonologically related lures are rejected in a false memory paradigm. Some phonological lures were emotional (i.e., taboo) words, and others were not. The authors manipulated the presence of taboo items on the study list and reduced the ability to use controlled rejection strategies by dividing…

Prism exposure produces 2 kinds of adaptive response. Recalibration is ordinary strategic remapping of spatially coded movement commands to rapidly reduce performance error. Realignment is the extraordinary process of transforming spatial maps to bring the origins of coordinate systems into correspondence. Realignment occurs when spatial…

The diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) and the leaky competing accumulator model (LCA, Usher & McClelland, 2001) were tested against two-choice data collected from the same subjects with the standard response time procedure and the response signal procedure. In the response signal procedure, a stimulus is presented and then, at one of a number of…

The purpose of this study was to establish a theoretical framework for Stevens' empirically derived power law. Three models were proposed to explain the power law. (Editor)

Hindsight bias is the phenomenon that after people are presented with the correct answer to a question, their judgment regarding their own past answer to this question is biased toward the correct answer. In three experiments, younger and older adults gave numerical responses to general-knowledge questions and later attempted to recall their…

The article by W. K. Estes marks a turning point in the mathematical learning theory movement. The central constructs were stimulus variability, stimulus sampling, and stimulus response association by contiguity, in a framework enabling prediction of response probability and latency. (SLD)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of being imitated on behaviors of preschool children. Each of 24 subjects was given a choice of three responses in a marble-dropping task and was required to make one choice, after which an experimenter either imitated or did not imitate a subject's behavior. The results indicated that when a…

To vicariously condition either fear or a positive emotional response, films in which a 5-year-old male model manifested one or the other response were shown to nursery school children. The measure of vicarious conditioning was the children's rate of response to the conditioned stimulus and a controlled stimulus in several operant situations after…

Psychological researchers should deal with the concrete stimulus-response principles of learning on which behavior is based, and study behaviors that are representative of real life behaviors. The present research strategy has come from two faulty ideas: first, a concern with underlying, inferred mental processes, rather than with actual tasks or…

This paper briefly reviews how subjects enhance performance by favoring some stimuli over others. The author calls the mechanism by which this is achieved "expectancy", a generic term including preparatory set, behavioral hypotheses, orienting reflex, and anticipatory goal responses. Temporal and event expectancy are contrasted. Verbal prediction…