In the Stroop task, congruency effects (i.e., the color-naming latency difference between incongruent stimuli, e.g., the word BLUE written in the color red, and congruent stimuli, e.g., RED in red) are smaller in a list in which incongruent trials are frequent than in a list in which incongruent trials are infrequent. The traditional explanation…

Recent context-control learning studies have shown that switch costs are reduced in a particular context predicting a high probability of switching as compared to another context predicting a low probability of switching. These context-specific switch probability effects suggest that control of task sets, through experience, can become associated…

Many words are associated with more than a single meaning. Words are sometimes "ambiguous," applying to unrelated meanings, but the majority of frequent words are "polysemous" in that they apply to multiple "related" meanings. In a preregistered design that included 2 tasks, we tested adults' and 4.5- to 7-year-old…

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…

It has been demonstrated that the Simon effect may be increased or reversed due to proportion congruency manipulation, suggesting that learned spatial irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations are used to guide responses. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that learning spatial irrelevant S-R associations by rewards may show a similar…

Phonotactics--constraints on the position and combination of speech sounds within syllables--are subject to statistical differences that gradiently affect speaker and listener behavior (e.g., Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). What statistical properties drive the acquisition of such constraints? Because they are naturally highly correlated, previous…

Learners make a number of decisions when attempting to study efficiently: they must choose which information to study, for how long to study it, and whether to restudy it later. The current experiments examine whether documented impairments to self-regulated learning when studying information sequentially, as opposed to simultaneously, extend to…

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…

Interventions for drug abuse and other maladaptive habitual behaviors may yield temporary success but are often fragile and relapse is common. This implies that current interventions do not erase or substantially modify the representations that support the underlying addictive behavior--that is, they do not cause true unlearning. One example of an…

Throughout the life span, we are capable of representing quantities in the absence of language, or nonsymbolically. Additionally, over the course of development, we learn many symbolic measurement systems for representing quantities such as time and number. Despite substantial evidence of a relation between the acquisition of symbolic and…

In conversational speech, it is very common for words' segments to be reduced or deleted. However, previous research has consistently shown that during spoken word recognition, listeners prefer words' canonical pronunciation over their reduced pronunciations (e.g., pretty pronounced [word omitted] vs. [word omitted]), even when the latter are far…

Increasing the number of study trials creates a crossover pattern in source memory zROC slopes; that is, the slope is either below or above 1 depending on which source receives stronger learning. This pattern can be produced if additional learning affects memory processes such as the relative contribution of recollection and familiarity to source…

Although relational reasoning has been described as a process at the heart of human cognition, the exact character of relational representations remains an open debate. Symbolic-connectionist models of relational cognition suggest that relations are structured representations, but that they are ultimately grounded in feature sets; thus, they…

In multiple-list learning, retrieval during learning has been suggested to improve recall of the single lists by enhancing list discrimination and, at test, reducing interference. Using electrophysiological, oscillatory measures of brain activity, we examined to what extent retrieval during learning facilitates list encoding. Subjects studied 5…

We examined free recall and metacognitive judgments of ambiguous sentences studied with and without clues to facilitate their comprehension. Sentences were either studied without clues, with clues meaningfully embedded, or with clues following a 10-s interval delay. After presentation, subjects made judgments of comprehension (JCOMPs) or judgments…