Ancient as well as modern writers have promoted the idea that bizarre images enhance memory. Research has documented bizarreness effects, with one standard technique finding that sentences describing unusual, implausible, or bizarre scenarios are better remembered than sentences describing plausible, every day, or common scenarios. Not…

People vary in their performance on visual working memory tasks, and these individual differences covary with a wide range of higher-level cognitive processes including fluid intelligence. Performance also varies across study displays, purportedly driven by both low- and higher-level processes. Understanding what causes these sources of systematic…

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…

Longer free time between presentation of verbal list items often leads to better immediate serial recall. The present series of three experiments demonstrates that this beneficial effect of time is more general than has been known: It is found for verbal items presented visually and auditorily (Experiments 1 and 2), and also when people engage in…

Attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015, 2016) demonstrates that we may not always be able to spontaneously retrieve a simple attribute of a visual object (e.g., its color) for conscious report, even though the object had just been the target in a visual task. Attribute amnesia has been suggested to reflect a lack of consolidation of the…

Multi-modal discourse comprehension requires speakers to combine information from speech and gestures. To date, little research has addressed the cognitive resources that underlie these processes. Here we used a dual-task paradigm to test the relative importance of verbal and visuospatial working memory in speech-gesture comprehension. Healthy,…

It is a prevailing theoretical claim that path integration is the primary means of developing global spatial representations. However, this claim is at odds with reported difficulty to develop global spatial representations of a multiscale environment using path integration. The current study tested a new hypothesis that locally similar but…

Working memory (WM) has a limited capacity; however, this limitation can be mitigated by selecting individual items from the set currently held in WM for prioritization. The selection mechanism underlying this prioritization ability is referred to as the focus of attention (FOA) in WM. Although impressive progress has been achieved in recent…

We explored the multi-dimensionality of mathematics and working memory (WM) by examining the differential relationships between different areas of mathematics with visual, spatial, and verbal WM. Previous research proposed that visuospatial WM is a unique predictor of mathematics, but neuroimaging and cognitive research suggest divisions within…

Working memory refers to the cognitive capacity to temporarily store and manipulate information from multiple sensory domains. Recent studies have shown that cognitive training can improve performance in both visual working memory and tactile working memory tasks. However, it is still unclear whether the effects of training can be transferred from…

People's expectations help them make judgments about the world. In the area of spatial memory, the interaction of existing knowledge with incoming information is best illustrated in the category effect, a bias in positioning a target toward the prototypical location of its region (Huttenlocher et al., 1991). According to Bayesian principles, these…

We report 4 experiments examining whether associations in visual working memory are subject to proactive interference from long-term memory (LTM). Following a long-term learning phase in which participants learned the colors of 120 unique objects, a working memory (WM) test was administered in which participants recalled the precise colors of 3…

The potential role of iconic memory in dyslexia-specific partial report deficits has never been investigated although it may help distinguish between different visuo-attentional theories of dyslexia. The present study is a first step towards such an investigation within an iconic memory framework. 20 French-speaking university students with…

Using Chinese characters, we investigated how stroke count and frequency of use influence attention and short-term memory (STM) encoding in Mainland Chinese speakers. To isolate specific components of attention we employed the Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), which allowed estimates of STM capacity, processing speed, and the threshold of visual…

In 8 experiments, we investigated motion fluency effects on object preference. In each experiment, distinct objects were repeatedly seen moving either fluently (with a smooth and predictable motion) or disfluently (with sudden and unpredictable direction changes) in a task where participants were required to respond to occasional brief changes in…