The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate…

Antilocality effects provide strong evidence for expectation-based sentence parsing models. Previous discussion of the antilocality effect, however, largely focused on the argument-verb dependencies in verb-final constructions, for which a memory retrieval-based account has been argued to be equally adequate. To test whether the principles of…

Knowing what one knows and accurately monitoring one's own capacities and performance on a moment-to-moment basis are important determinants of task success. Individual differences in such metacognitive monitoring are well documented, but what determines an individual's monitoring accuracy in a particular context is yet to be fully understood. One…

Item memory and source memory are different aspects of episodic remembering. To investigate metamemory differences between them, the authors assessed systematic differences between predictions of item memory via Judgments of Learning (JOLs) and source memory via Judgments of Source (JOSs). Schema-based expectations affect JOLs and JOSs…

The evaluative conditioning (EC) phenomenon is central to the study of preference acquisition and attitude formation. Early studies have reported EC in the absence of awareness, but more recent work has questioned this conclusion. In previous work, using briefly presented and pattern-masked conditioned stimuli (CSs), we found that above-chance…

Working memory (WM) training has been proposed as a promising intervention to enhance cognitive abilities, but convincing evidence for transfer to untrained abilities is lacking. Prevalent limitations of WM training studies include the narrow assessment of both WM and cognitive abilities, the analysis of manifest variables subject to measurement…

Post-error cognitive control processes are evident in post-error slowing (PES) and post-error increased accuracy (PIA). A recent theory (Wessel, 2018) proposes that post-error control disrupts not only ongoing motor activity but also current task-set representations, suggesting an interdependence of post-error control and memory. In 2 experiments,…

Numerous studies of retrieval-induced forgetting have shown that the selective retrieval of some studied items can impair recall of other nonretrieved items. Varying the lag between study and selective retrieval and using lists of unrelated items as study material, recent work replicated this detrimental effect when the lag between study and…

Retrieval practice relative to restudy of learned material typically attenuates time-dependent forgetting. A recent study examining this testing effect across 12-h delays filled with nocturnal sleep versus daytime wakefulness, however, showed that sleep directly following encoding benefited recall of restudied but not of retrieval practiced items,…

Most studies on spatial memory refer to the horizontal plane, leaving an open question as to whether findings generalize to vertical spaces where gravity and the visual upright of our surrounding space are salient orientation cues. In three experiments, we examined which reference frame is used to organize memory for vertical locations: the one…

A large body of evidence shows an animacy effect on memory in that animate entities are better remembered than inanimate ones. Yet, the reason for this mnemonic prioritization remains unclear. In the survival processing literature, the assumption that richness of encoding is responsible for adaptive memory benefits has received substantial…

Sequences of auditory objects such as one-syllable words or brief sounds disrupt serial recall of visually presented targets even when the auditory objects are completely irrelevant for the task at hand. The "token set size effect" is a label for the claim that disruption increases only when moving from a 1-token distractor sequence…

Words printed in a larger 48-point font are judged to be more memorable than words printed in a smaller 18-point font, although font size does not affect actual memory. To clarify the basis of this font size effect on metamemory and memory, 4 experiments investigated how presenting words in 48 (Experiment 1) or 4 (Experiments 2 to 4) font sizes…

Event-based prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform an intention in response to an environmental cue. Recent microstructure models postulate four distinguishable stages of successful event-based PM fulfillment. That is, (a) the event must be noticed, (b) the intention must be retrieved, (c) the context must be verified, and…

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a change in liking of neutral conditioned stimuli (CS) following pairings with positive or negative stimuli (unconditioned stimulus, US). A dissociation has been reported between US expectancy and CS evaluation in extinction learning: When CSs are presented alone subsequent to CS-US pairings, participants cease to…