Concepts contain rich structures that support flexible semantic cognition. These structures can be characterized by patterns of feature covariation: Certain features tend to cluster in the same items (e.g., "feathers," "wings," "can fly"). Existing computational models demonstrate how this kind of structure can be…

There is growing recognition that working memory and selective attention are highly related. However, a key function of selective attention--ignoring distractors--is much less understood in the domain of working memory. In the attention domain, it is now clear that distractors' task relevance and stimulation of multiple senses at a time (i.e.,…

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…

People often rely on the covariation between events to infer causality. However, covariation between cues and outcomes may change over time. In the associative learning literature, extinction provides a model to study updating of causal beliefs when a previously established relationship no longer holds. Prediction error theories can explain both…

One of the best-known demonstrations of long-term learning through repetition is the Hebb effect: Immediate recall of a memory list repeated amidst nonrepeated lists improves steadily with repetitions. However, previous studies often failed to observe this effect for visuospatial arrays. Souza and Oberauer (2022) showed that the strongest…

The Hebb repetition effect shows improvement in serial recall of repeated lists compared to random nonrepeated lists. Previous research using simple span tasks found that the Hebb repetition effect is limited to constant uninterrupted lists, suggesting chunking as the mechanism of list learning. However, the Hebb repetition effect has been found…

It is commonly accepted that repeatedly using mental procedures results in a transition to memory retrieval, but the determinant of this process is still unclear. In a 3-week experiment, we compared two different learning situations involving basic additions, one based on counting and the other based on arithmetic fact memorization. Two groups of…

Most printed Chinese words are compounds built from the combination of meaningful characters. Yet, there is a poor understanding of how individual characters contribute to the recognition of compounds. Using a megastudy of Chinese word recognition (Tse et al., 2017), we examined how the lexical decision of existing and novel Chinese compounds was…

Responses are slower in two-choice tasks when either a previous stimulus feature or the previous response repeats than when all features repeat or all features change. Current views of action control posit that such partial repetition costs (PRCs) index the time to update a prior "binding" between a stimulus feature and the response or…

We used a novel linguistic training paradigm to investigate the experience-dependent acquisition, representation, and processing of novel emotional and neutral abstract concepts. Participants engaged in mental imagery (n = 32) or lexico-semantic rephrasing (n = 34) of linguistic material during five training sessions and successfully learned the…

Visual search is faster when a fixed target location is paired with a spatially invariant (vs. randomly changing) distractor configuration, thus indicating that repeated contexts are learned, thereby guiding attention to the target (contextual cueing [CC]). Evidence for memory-guided attention has also been revealed with electrophysiological…