Memory & Cognition

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While abstractionist theories of visual word recognition propose that perceptual elements like font and letter case are filtered out during lexical access, instance-based theories allow for the possibility that these surface details influence this process. To disentangle these accounts, we focused on brand names embedded in logotypes. The consistent visual presentation of brand names may render them much more susceptible to perceptual factors than common words. In the present study, we compared original and modified brand logos, varying in font or letter case...

Models of recognition memory often assume that decisions are made independently from each other. Yet there is growing evidence that consecutive recognition responses show sequential dependencies, whereby making one response increases the probability of repeating that response from one trial to the next trial. Across six experiments, we replicated this response-related carryover effect using word and nonword stimuli and further demonstrated that the content of the previous trial-both perceptual and conceptual-can also bias the response to the current test probe, with both perceptual (orthographic) and conceptual (semantic) similarity boosting the probability of consecutive "old" responses...

Corrections to readers' misconceptions should result in higher belief when information sources are of high credibility. However, evaluations of credibility may be malleable, and we do not yet fully understand how changes to a source's credibility influence readers' credibility evaluations and knowledge revision outcomes. Thus, in two experiments, we examined how updating a source's credibility (Experiment 1: initially neutral sources later updated to be high-, low-, or neutral-credibility sources; Experiment 2: initially high- or low-credibility sources later updated to be low- or high-credibility sources) influenced knowledge revision and source credibility evaluations after readers engaged with refutation and non-refutation texts...

Transformative experiences in an individual's life have a lasting impact on identity, belief system, and values. At the core of these experiences is the complex emotion of awe that promotes learning, making it worthwhile to study from an educational point of view. Drawing studies may provide a useful measure of awe in children-one that is more intuitive and attractive than questionnaires alone. Previous studies conducted with adults indicated that the diminished self, associated with transformative experiences, manifests in an actual decrease in size for figures representing the self in drawings...

The attentional boost effect (ABE) and action-induced memory enhancement (AIME) suggest that memory performance for target-paired items is superior to that for distractor-paired items when participants performed a target detection task and a memory encoding task simultaneously. Though the memory enhancement has been well established, the temporal dynamics of how the target detection task influenced memory encoding remains unclear. To investigate this, we manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between detection stimuli and the words to be memorized using a remember/know study-test paradigm, and we focused primarily on memory performance for the words that appeared after the detection response...

The long-term fate of to-be-remembered information depends in part on the conditions of initial learning, including mental operations engaged via working memory. However, the mechanistic role of working memory (WM) processes in subsequent episodic memory (EM) remains unclear. Does re-exposure to word-pairs during WM recognition testing improve EM for those associations? Are benefits from WM re-exposure greater after an opportunity for retrieval practice compared to mere re-exposure to the memoranda? These questions are addressed in three experiments (N = 460) designed to assess whether WM-based recognition testing benefits long-term associative memory relative to WM-based restudying...

The pseudocontingency framework provides a parsimonious strategy for inferring the contingency between two variables by assessing the base rates. Frequently occurring levels are associated, as are rarely occurring levels. However, this strategy can lead to different contingency inferences in different contexts, depending on how the base rates vary across contexts. Here, we examine how base-rate consistency influences base-rate learning and reliance by contrasting consistent with inconsistent base rates. We hypothesized that base-rate learning is facilitated, and that people rely more on base rates if base rates are consistent...

Although long-term visual memory (LTVM) has a remarkable capacity, the fidelity of its episodic representations can be influenced by at least two intertwined interference mechanisms during the encoding of objects belonging to the same category: the capacity to hold similar episodic traces (e.g., different birds) and the conceptual similarity of the encoded traces (e.g., a sparrow shares more features with a robin than with a penguin). The precision of episodic traces can be tested by having participants discriminate lures (unseen objects) from targets (seen objects) representing different exemplars of the same concept (e...

Working memory (WM) capacity has been shown to influence how readers resolve syntactic ambiguities. Building on the work of Swets et al. (2007, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136[1], 64-81), the goal of the present study was to assess the effects of working memory and language proficiency on first language (L1) relative clause attachment decisions across three different language samples: English monolinguals, L1-L2 Spanish-English heritage bilinguals, and L1-L2 Mandarin-English bilinguals. Binomial logistic regression analyses demonstrated that low WM span is associated with a preference to attach ambiguous relative clauses higher in the syntactic structure, as reported by Swets et al...

How do we remember traumatic events, and are these memories different in individuals who experience post-traumatic stress? Some evidence suggests that traumatic events are mnemonically enhanced, or include more episodic detail, relative to other types of memories. Simultaneously, individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have more non-episodic details in all of their memories, a pattern hypothesized to result from impairment in executive function. Here, we explore these questions in a unique population that experienced severely traumatic events more than 20 years ago - individuals who lived through the 1994 genocide in Rwanda...

Whereas the effects of emotional intensity (the perceived strength of an item's valence or arousal) have long been studied in true- and false-memory research, emotional ambiguity (the uncertainty that attaches to perceived emotional intensity) has only been studied recently. Available evidence suggests that emotional ambiguity has reliable effects on true memory that are distinct from those of emotional intensity. However, those findings are mostly restricted to recall, and the effects of emotional ambiguity on false memory remain unexplored...

A robber points a gun at a cashier and says: "Only one of these two options is true: If you conceal the combination to the safe, then I kill you; otherwise, if you don´t conceal the combination to the safe, then I kill you." Hearing this statement, most people conclude that, in either case, "I kill you." This is an illusory response, in fact; the valid conclusion states "I don´t kill you." The research reported here studied the roles that different expressions of conditionals ("if-then," "only if," and "if and only if") play in the illusory response...

The present experiments examined whether the temporal distribution of procedural category learning experiences would impact learning outcomes. Participants completed the remote category learning experiments on a smartphone in one of two learning conditions: massed or distributed. Consistent with expectations, distributed learners in both experiments reached higher accuracy levels than massed learners. In Experiment 1 the effect disappeared after accounting for reaction time differences, suggesting that it was driven by attentional mechanisms...

In her 1926 book Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings, Florence Goodenough pioneered the quantitative analysis of children's human-figure drawings as a tool for evaluating their cognitive development. This influential work launched a broad enterprise in cognitive evaluation that continues to the present day, with most clinicians and researchers deploying variants of the checklist-based scoring methods that Goodenough invented. Yet recent work leveraging computational innovations in cognitive science suggests that human-figure drawings possess much richer structure than checklist-based approaches can capture...

Cognitive control processes are central to adaptive behavior, but how control is applied in a context-appropriate manner is not fully understood. One way to produce context-sensitive control is by mnemonically linking particular control settings to specific stimuli that demanded those settings in a prior encounter. In support of this episodic reinstatement of control hypothesis, recent studies have produced evidence for the formation of stimulus-control associations in one-shot, prime-probe learning paradigms...

Despite everyday argumentation being crucial to human communication and decision-making, the cognitive determinants of argument evaluation are poorly known. This study examined how attitudes and aspects of cognitive sophistication, i.e., thinking styles and scientific literacy, relate to people's acceptance of poorly justified arguments (e.g., unwarranted appeals to naturalness) on controversial topics (e.g., genetically modified organisms (GMOs)). The participants were more accepting of poorly justified arguments that aligned with their attitudes compared to those that opposed their attitudes, and this was true regardless of one's thinking styles or level of scientific literacy...

People are often presented with large amounts of information to remember, and in many cases, the font size of information may be indicative of its importance (such as headlines or warnings). In the present study, we examined how learners perceive the importance of information in different font sizes and how beliefs about font size influence selective memory. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with to-be-remembered words that were either unrelated or related to a goal (e.g., items for a camping trip) in either small or large font...

Cognitive flexibility increases when switch demands increase. In task switching experiments, repeated pairing of flexibility-demanding situations with specific contexts leads subjects to become more prepared to adapt to changing task demands in those contexts. One form of such upregulated cognitive flexibility has been demonstrated with a list-wide switch probability (LWSP) effect, where switch costs are smaller in lists with frequent switches than in lists with rare switches. According to a recent proposal, the LWSP effect is supported by a concurrent activation mechanism whereby both task rules are kept available simultaneously in working memory...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by autobiographical memory deficits, with the ability to retrieve episodic-rich memories being particularly affected. Here, we investigated the influence of AD on a specific subtype of episodic memories known as flashbulb memories (i.e., the ability to remember the personal circumstances for the reception of important news events). We examined the frequency, characteristics, and the temporal distribution of flashbulb memories across the life span. To this aim, 28 older adults diagnosed with AD and a matched sample of 29 healthy older controls were probed for flashbulb memories for two historical events from each decade of their lives...