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…

Different "thought experiments" dominate teaching approaches to weightlessness, reducing students' opportunities for active physics learning, which should include observations, descriptions, explanations and predictions of real phenomena. Besides the controversy related to conceptual definitions of weight and weightlessness, we report…

Speech perception is beyond the auditory domain and a multimodal process, specifically, an auditory-visual one--we process lip and face movements during speech. In this paper, the findings in cross-language studies of auditory-visual speech perception in the past two decades are interpreted to the applied domain of second language (L2)…

We implemented NSF-funded computerized Experimental Psychology Laboratories at Touro College and incorporated process-oriented guided-inquiry learning (POGIL). We designed POGIL modules for the labs and conducted workshops for faculty on the implementation of the guided-inquiry approach, including learning teams. Data were collected from students…

The framework of "plateaus, dips, and leaps" shines light on periods when individuals may be inventing new methods of skilled performance. We begin with a review of the role "performance plateaus" have played in (a) experimental psychology, (b) human-computer interaction, and (c) cognitive science. We then reanalyze two classic…

There is much evidence that the prospect of reward modulates cognitive control in terms of more stable behavior. Increases in expected reward magnitude, however, have been suggested to increase flexible behavior as evidenced by reduced switch costs. In a series of experiments, the authors provide evidence that this increased cognitive flexibility…

Recent studies of metamemory appraisals implicated in autobiographical remembering have established distinct roles for judgments of occurrence, recollection, and accuracy for past events. In studies involving everyday remembering, measures of recollection and accuracy correlate highly (>.85). Thus although their measures are structurally…

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is the observation that retrieval of target information causes forgetting of related nontarget information. A number of accounts of this phenomenon have been proposed, including a context-shift-based account (Jonker, Seli, & Macleod, 2013). This account proposes that RIF occurs as a result of the context…

In August 2015, in an article entitled "Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychology Science," the journal "Science" reported the findings of a comprehensive collaboration of social scientist researchers, collectively described as the "Open Science Collaboration" (OSC), who replicated the findings of 100 experiments…

Because different musical scales use different sets of intervals and, hence, different musical pitches, how do music listeners learn those that are in their native musical system? One possibility is that musical pitches are acquired in the same way as phonemes, that is, via distributional learning, in which learners infer knowledge from the…

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.,…

During locomotion, individuals can determine their positions with either idiothetic cues from movement (path integration systems) or visual landmarks (piloting systems). This project investigated how these 2 systems interact in determining humans' positions. In 2 experiments, participants studied the locations of 5 target objects and 1 single…

How does orthographic distinctiveness affect recall of structured (categorized) word lists? On one theory, enhanced item-specific information (e.g., more distinct encoding) in concert with robust relational information (e.g., categorical information) optimally supports free recall. This predicts that for categorically structured lists,…

In recognition memory, "recollection" is defined as retrieval of the context associated with an event, whereas "familiarity" is defined as retrieval based on item strength alone. Recent studies have shown that conventional recollection-based tasks, in which context details are manipulated for source memory assessment at test,…