Cognitive control theories describe the active maintenance of goal representations over temporal delays as central for adaptive behavior. Dynamic adaptations of goal representations are often measured as the congruency sequence effect (CSE), which describes a reduced congruency effect in trials following incongruent trials compared to congruent…

Past research indicates that people judge repeated statements as more true than new ones. An experiential consequence of repetition that may underly this "truth effect" is processing fluency: Processing statements feels easier following their repetition. In three preregistered experiments (N = 684), we examined the effect of merely…

An ongoing debate in the literature on human reasoning concerns whether or not the logical status (valid vs. invalid) of an argument can be intuitively detected. The finding that conclusions of logically valid inferences are liked more compared to conclusions of logically invalid ones--called the logic-liking effect--is one of the most prominent…

Disfluencies such as pauses, "um"s, and "uh"s are common interruptions in the speech stream. Previous work probing memory for disfluent speech shows memory benefits for disfluent compared to fluent materials. Complementary evidence from studies of language production and comprehension have been argued to show that different…

There is extensive evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical patterns of linguistic elements at the phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. However, much less is known about how people classify referential events and whether they adapt to the most frequent types of references. Reference is particularly complex because referential…

Individuals with dyslexia often present phonological difficulties, ultimately impacting their reading and writing. Nevertheless, an individual with dyslexia may circumvent these difficulties through a reliance on linguistic units with more consistent spellings, such as morphemes. The increased use of morphological information by individuals with…

Speaking with a foreign accent has often been thought to carry several disadvantages. Here, we probe a potential social "advantage" of non-native compared to native speakers using spoken utterances that either obey or violate the pragmatic principle of Informativeness. In Experiment 1, we show that listeners form different impressions of…

The retro-cue effect (RCE) describes the finding that participants' working memory performance is enhanced when their attention is directed to the to-be-tested position by a spatial cue during the retention interval. Here, we explore the relationship between RCE and working memory consolidation. A sequential display retro-cue paradigm is used for…

While our perceptual experience seems to unfold continuously over time, episodic memory preserves distinct events for storage and recollection. Previous work shows that stability in encoding context serves to temporally bind individual items into sequential composite events. This phenomenon has been almost exclusively studied using visual and…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

In describing how people generalize from observed samples of data to novel cases, theories of inductive inference have emphasized the learner's reliance on the contents of the sample. More recently, a growing body of literature suggests that different assumptions about how a data sample was generated can lead the learner to draw qualitatively…

Rational numbers are represented by multiple notations: fractions, decimals, and percentages. Whereas previous studies have investigated affordances of these notations for representing different types of information (DeWolf et al., 2015; Tian et al., 2020), the present study investigated their affordances for solving different types of arithmetic…

In classification learning of artificial stimuli, participants learn the perfectly diagnostic dimension better than the partially diagnostic dimensions. Also, there is a strong preference for a unidimensional categorization based on the perfectly diagnostic dimension. In a different experimental procedure, called array-based classification task,…

This work investigates how people make judgments about the content of their visual working memory (VWM). Some studies on long-term memory suggest that people base those metacognitive judgments on the outcome of a retrieval attempt. In contrast, Son and Metcalfe (2005) observed that people identify poorly remembered items immediately, presumably by…

Natural environments provide a rich spatiotemporal context that allows for visual objects to be differentiated based on different types of information: their absolute or relative spatial or temporal coordinates, or their ordinal positions in a spatial or temporal sequence. Here, we investigated which spatial and temporal properties are…