In human research, studies of return of fear (ROF) phenomena, and reinstatement in particular, began only a decade ago and recently are more widely used, e.g., as outcome measures for fear/extinction memory manipulations (e.g., reconsolidation). As reinstatement research in humans is still in its infancy, providing an overview of its stability and…

The dorsal hippocampus is crucial for mammalian spatial memory, but its exact role in item memory is still hotly debated. Recent evidence in humans suggested that the hippocampus might be selectively involved in item short-term memory to deal with an increasing memory load. In this study, we sought to test this hypothesis. To this aim we developed…

Both sleep spindles and slow oscillations have been implicated in sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Whereas spindles occur during both light and deep sleep, slow oscillations are restricted to deep sleep, raising the possibility of greater consolidation-related spindle involvement during deep sleep. We assessed declarative memory retention…

Using a conditioned suppression task, we investigated extinction and renewal of Pavlovian modulation in human sequential Feature Positive (FP) discrimination learning. In Experiment 1, in context a participants were first trained on two FP discriminations, X[right arrow]A+/A- and Y[right arrow]B+/B-. Extinction treatment was administered in the…

Relatively little attention has been paid thus far in memory research to the effects of measurement instruments intended to assess memory processes on the constructs being measured. The current article investigates the influence of employing the popular remember/know (R/K) measurement procedure on memory performance itself. This measurement…

Koen and Yonelinas (2010; K&Y) reported that mixing classes of targets that had short (weak) or long (strong) study times had no impact on zROC slope, contradicting the predictions of the encoding variability hypothesis. We show that they actually derived their predictions from a mixture unequal-variance signal detection (UVSD) model, which…

Recognition memory is often modeled as constituting 2 separate processes, recollection and familiarity, rather than as constituting a single process mediated by a generic latent strength. One way of stating evidence for the more complex 2-process model is to show dissociations with select manipulations, in which one manipulation affects…

In the laboratory, people classify the color of emotion-laden words slower than they do that of neutral words, the emotional Stroop effect. Outside the laboratory, people react to features of emotion-laden stimuli or threatening stimuli faster than they do to those of neutral stimuli. A possible resolution to the conundrum implicates the…

How do children know the sentence "the glass is empty and not empty" is inconsistent? One possibility is that they are sensitive to the formal structure of the sentences and know that a proposition and its negation cannot be jointly true. Alternatively, they could represent the 2 state of affairs referred to and realize that these are…

In the current article, we introduce a new methodology for detecting whether a word in a sentence is conceptually represented as plural and use it to shed light on a debate about whether comprehenders interpret singular indefinite noun phrases within a distributed predicate as plural during online reading. Experiment 1 extended a methodology…

In 4 studies, the authors examined the hypothesis that the structure of the informational environment makes small samples more informative than large ones for drawing inferences about population correlations. The specific purpose of the studies was to test predictions arising from the signal detection simulations of R. B. Anderson, M. E. Doherty,…

Recent methodological advances have allowed researchers to address confounds in the measurement of task-switch costs in task-switching performance by dissociating cue switching from task switching. For example, in the transition-cuing procedure, which involves presenting cues for task transitions rather than for tasks, cue transitions (cue…

The n-back task requires participants to decide whether each stimulus in a sequence matches the one that appeared n items ago. Although n-back has become a standard "executive" working memory (WM) measure in cognitive neuroscience, it has been subjected to few behavioral tests of construct validity. A combined experimental-correlational study…

Two experiments explored the differential effects of two kinds of organization (taxonomic and schematic) on retrieval of information. (Author/PN)

The nature of memory processes has been inferred from (1) direct comparisons of recognition and cued recall performance, (2) indirect comparisons using different types of target stimuli, and (3) studies of recognition varying target material. Investigators have overlooked the possibility that recognition performance can be manipulated by changing…