Remembered utility is the retrospective evaluation about the pleasure and pain associated with a past experience. It can influence choices about repeating or avoiding similar situations in the future (Kahneman, 2000). A set of 5 experiments explored the remembered utility of effortful test episodes and how it impacted future test choices.…

The experiments reported here were designed to replicate and extend McCabe, Roediger, and Karpicke's (2011) finding that retrieval in category cued recall involves both controlled and automatic processes. The extension entailed identifying whether distinctive encoding affected 1 or both of these 2 processes. The first experiment successfully…

There is increasing evidence that the plural is semantically unmarked for number such that a plural can be interpreted as meaning "at least one." The 2 experiments reported here used a picture matching paradigm to investigate the conceptual representations built during the comprehension of sentences with plural definite descriptions…

In 2 variants of the color-word Stroop task, we compared 5 types of color-neutral distractors--real words (e.g., "HAT"), pseudowords (e.g., "HIX"), consonant strings (e.g., "HDK"), symbol strings (e.g., #$%), and a row of Xs (e.g., "XXX")--as well as incongruent color words (e.g., "GREEN" displayed…

Within phenomenological philosophy four topics, (1) Body, (2) Time, (3) Others and the Social Order and (4) World serve as the major contexts in which human perception, action and reflection take place. At present only three of these domains have been studied from an empirical perspective, leaving Body as the one domain requiring further analysis.…

What happens to memories as we forget? They might gradually lose fidelity, lose their associations (and thus be retrieved in response to the incorrect cues), or be completely lost. Typical long-term memory studies assess memory as a binary outcome (correct/incorrect), and cannot distinguish these different kinds of forgetting. Here we assess…

Seven experiments tested, whether when naming a colored object (e.g., "CAR"), its color (e.g., "red") is phonologically encoded. In the first experiment, adults had to say aloud the names of colored line drawings of objects that were each displayed among 3 black-and-white line drawings (Experiment 1a) or that were presented…

The disciplines of art and experimental psychology share a number of interesting areas of overlap which are unknown and/or unconsidered by many. This purpose of this article is to elucidate topics that are of interest to both artists and psychologists in an attempt to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations. It is only on rare occasions that…

What are the cognitive mechanisms underlying subjective valuations formed on the basis of sequential experiences of an option's possible outcomes? Ashby and Rakow (2014) have proposed a sliding window model (SWIM), according to which people's valuations represent the average of a limited sample of recent experiences (the size of which is estimated…

The piecemeal reporting of unfolding news events can lead to the reporting of mistaken information (or misinformation) about the cause of the newsworthy event, which later needs to be corrected. Studies of the "continued influence effect" have shown, however, that corrections are not entirely effective in reversing the effects of initial…

This study sought to determine whether nonselective retrieval practice after study can reduce memories' susceptibility to intralist interference, as it is observed in the list-length effect, output interference, and retrieval-induced forgetting. Across 3 experiments, we compared the effects of nonselective retrieval practice and restudy on…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is a crucial repository of information when events unfold rapidly before our eyes, yet it maintains only a fraction of the sensory information encoded by the visual system. Here, we tested the hypothesis that saccadic eye movements provide a natural bottleneck for the transition of fragile content in sensory memory…

Unlike other animals, humans have the unique ability to share and use verbal instructions to prepare for upcoming tasks. Recent research showed that instructions are sufficient for the automatic, reflex-like activation of responses. However, systematic studies into the limits of these automatic effects of task instructions remain relatively…

Three experiments contrasted recollection of change with differentiation as means of avoiding retroactive interference and proactive interference. We manipulated the extent to which participants looked back to notice change between pairs of cues and targets (A-B, A-D) and measured the effects on later cued recall of either the first or second…

Events always unfold in a spatial context, leading to the claim that it serves as a scaffold for encoding and retrieving episodic memories. The ubiquitous co-occurrence of spatial context with events may induce participants to generate a spatial context when hearing scenarios of events in which it is absent. Spatial context should also serve as an…