Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that the human brain activates dissociable cognitive control networks in response to conflicts arising within the cognitive and the affective domain. The present study tested the hypothesis that nonemotional and emotional conflict regulation can also be dissociated on a functional level. For that purpose, we…

We examined whether illusory self-motion perception ("vection") induced by viewing upward and downward grating motion stimuli can alter the emotional valence of recollected autobiographical episodic memories. We found that participants recollected positive episodes more often while perceiving upward vection. However, when we tested a small moving…

We examined whether individual differences in working memory influence the facility with which individuals learn new categories. Participants learned two different types of category structures: "rule-based" and "information-integration." Successful learning of the former category structure is thought to be based on explicit…

Capacity limits in linguistic short-term memory (STM) are typically measured with forward span tasks in which participants are asked to recall lists of words in the order presented. Using such tasks, native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) exhibit smaller spans than native speakers ([Boutla, M., Supalla, T., Newport, E. L., & Bavelier, D.…

Studies of monolingual speakers have shown a strong association between lexical learning and short-term memory (STM) capacity, especially STM for serial order information. At the same time, studies of bilingual speakers suggest that phonological knowledge is the main factor that drives lexical learning. This study tested these two hypotheses…