In 2 experiments, eye-tracking was used to examine individual differences in attention during encoding and their relation to associative learning. Pupillary responses were used as an indicator of the amount of attention devoted to items, whereas eye fixations provided a means of assessing attentional focus among items within each to-be-remembered…

Taking a test improves memory for that tested information, a finding referred to as the testing effect. Multiple-choice tests tend to produce smaller testing effects than do cued-recall tests, and this result is largely attributed to the different processing that the two formats are assumed to induce. Specifically, it is generally assumed that the…

This article investigates the relation between mind wandering and the spacing effect in inductive learning. Participants studied works of art by different artists grouped in blocks, where works by a particular artist were either presented all together successively (the massed condition), or interleaved with the works of other artists (the spaced…

The present study disentangles 2 sources of the congruence sequence effect with masked primes: congruence and response time of the previous trial (reaction time [RT] carry-over). Using arrows as primes and targets and a metacontrast masking procedure we found congruence as well as congruence sequence effects. In addition, congruence sequence…

Working memory is crucial for many higher level cognitive functions, ranging from mental arithmetic to reasoning and problem solving. Likewise, the ability to learn and categorize novel concepts forms an indispensable part of human cognition. However, very little is known about the relationship between working memory and categorization. This…

Category learning is a complex phenomenon that engages multiple cognitive processes, many of which occur simultaneously and unfold dynamically over time. For example, as people encounter objects in the world, they simultaneously engage processes to determine their fit with current knowledge structures, gather new information about the objects, and…

The ability to learn visual-phonological associations is a unique predictor of word reading, and individuals with developmental dyslexia show impaired ability in learning these associations. In this study, we compared developmentally dyslexic and nondyslexic adults on their ability to form cross-modal associations (or "bindings") based…

Early verbal-memory researchers assumed participants represent memory of a pair of unrelated items with 2 independent, separately modifiable, directional associations. However, memory for pairs of unrelated words (A-B) exhibits associative symmetry: a near-perfect correlation between accuracy on forward (A??) and backward (??B) cued recall. This…

According to the ease-of-processing hypothesis, judgments of learning (JOLs) rely on the ease with which items are committed to memory during encoding--that is, encoding fluency. Conclusive evidence for this hypothesis does not yet exist because encoding fluency and item difficulty have been confounded in all previous studies. To disentangle the…