Searching for missing or wanted people is a crucial task in our society. Previous work on prospective person memory (PPM) has demonstrated that performance on this type of search task is worse relative to standard prospective memory tasks. Importantly, this process may be further affected by the race of the missing person, yet this has never been…

Numerous studies have found that selective attention affects category learning. However, previous research did not distinguish between the contribution of focusing and filtering components of selective attention. This study addresses this issue by examining how components of selective attention affect category representation. Participants first…

When selecting fillers to include in a police lineup, one must consider the level of similarity between the suspect and potential fillers. In order to reduce misidentifications, an innocent suspect should not stand out. Therefore, it is important that the fillers share some degree of similarity. Importantly, increasing suspect-filler similarity…

Numerous studies have found better memory for multimodal than unimodal stimuli. In these studies, however, multimodal stimuli consist not only of multiple modalities, but also of more varied information than unimodal. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated encoding variability as an explanation for the multisensory benefit. Written words…

This study examined how well people can recognize and relate to animated pedagogical agents of varying ethnicities/races and genders. For both Study 1 (realistic-style agents) and Study 2 (cartoon-style agents), participants viewed brief video clips of virtual agents of varying racial/ethnic categories and gender types and then identified their…

Throughout prolonged tasks, visual attention fluctuates temporally in response to the present stimuli, task demands, and changes in available attentional resources. This temporal fluctuation has downstream effects on memory for stimuli presented during the task. Researchers have established that detection of a target (e.g., a square of a color to…

The response time concealed information test (RT-CIT) can reveal that a person recognizes a relevant item (probe) among other, irrelevant items, based on slower responding to the probe compared to the irrelevant items. Thereby, if this person is concealing knowledge about the relevance of this item (e.g., recognizing it as a murder weapon), this…

We evaluated the detailed, behavioral properties of face matching performance in two specialist groups: forensic facial examiners and super-recognizers. Both groups compare faces to determine identity with high accuracy and outperform the general population. Typically, facial examiners are highly trained; super-recognizers rely on natural ability.…

Iconicity refers to a resemblance between word form and meaning. Previous work has shown that iconic words are learned earlier and processed faster. Here, we examined whether iconic words are recognized better on a recognition memory task. We also manipulated the level at which items were encoded--with a focus on either their meaning or their…

Successful recognition is generally thought to be based on both recollection and familiarity of studied information. Recent studies found that making judgments of learning (JOLs) can reactively facilitate recognition performance, a form of reactivity effect on memory. The current study aimed to explore the roles of recollection and familiarity in…

The manuscript describes an experimental investigation of a technique that might reduce memory conformity: the reinforced self-affirmation procedure (RSA). While previous studies have already demonstrated the RSA's effectiveness in reducing other memory distortions (e.g., the misinformation effect and interrogative suggestibility), this has not…

This study examined whether our ability to accurately estimate unfamiliar faces' ages declines when they are wearing sunglasses or surgical-style face masks and whether these disguises make it harder to later recognise those faces when undisguised. In theory, both disguises should harm age estimation accuracy and later face recognition as they…

We report the first evidence that the gist mechanism of fuzzy-trace theory and the associative mechanism of activation monitoring theory operate in parallel, in the recall version of the Deese/Roediger/McDermott illusion. In three experiments, we implemented a new methodology that allows their respective empirical indexes, gist strength (GS) and…

Humans are often tasked to remember new faces so that they can recognize the faces later in time. Previous studies found that memory reports for basic visual features (e.g., colors and shapes) are susceptible to systematic distortions as a result of comparison with new visual input, especially when the input is perceived as similar to the memory.…

Two experiments explored the search for pairs of faces in a disjunctive dual-target face search (DDTFS) task for unfamiliar face targets. The distinctiveness of the target was manipulated such that both faces were typical or distinctive or contained one typical and one distinctive target. Targets were searched for in arrays of eight faces. In…