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…

Ratings of perceptual experience on a trial-by-trial basis are increasingly used in masked priming studies to assess prime awareness. It is argued that such subjective ratings more adequately capture the content of phenomenal consciousness compared to the standard objective psychophysical measures obtained in a session after the priming…

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…

The lexical representation of compound words in speech production is still under debate. While most studies with healthy adult speakers suggest that a single lemma representation is active during compound production, data from neuropsychological studies point toward multiple representations, with activation of the compound's constituent lemmas in…

One benefit of working in groups is that group members can learn from each other how to perform the task, a phenomenon called group-to-individual transfer (G-I transfer). In the context of quantitative judgments, G-I transfer means that group members improve their individual accuracy as a consequence of exchanging task-relevant information. This…

Language-specific differences in number words influence number processing even in nonverbal numerical tasks. For instance, the unit-decade compatibility effect in two-digit number magnitude comparison (compatible number pairs [42_57: 4 < 5 and 2 < 7] are responded to faster than incompatible pairs [47_62: 4 < 6 but 7 > 2]) was shown to…

Manipulations that induce disfluency during encoding generally produce lower memory predictions for the disfluent condition than for the fluent condition. Similar to other manipulations of disfluency, generating lies takes longer and requires more mental effort than does telling the truth; hence, a manipulation of lie generation might produce…

Sequential effects in conflict processing (postconflict slowing and conflict adaptation) have primarily been studied in stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) tasks. Moreover, results obtained in SRC paradigms are often proposed as a model of higher-level motivational conflicts. The authors present 3 experiments suggesting that motivational…

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged…

Short-term memory (STM) for serially presented visual items is disrupted by task-irrelevant, to-beignored speech. Five experiments investigated the extent to which irrelevant speech is processed semantically by contrasting the following two hypotheses: (1) semantic processing of irrelevant speech is limited and does not interfere with serial STM…

Humans segment the continuous stream of sensory information into distinct events at points of change. Between 2 events, humans perceive an event boundary. Present theories propose changes in the sensory information to trigger updating processes of the present event model. Increased encoding effort finally leads to a memory benefit at event…

This study sought to determine whether nonselective retrieval practice after study can reduce memories' susceptibility to intralist interference, as it is observed in the list-length effect, output interference, and retrieval-induced forgetting. Across 3 experiments, we compared the effects of nonselective retrieval practice and restudy on…

The time required to determine the larger of 2 digits decreases with their numerical distance, and, for a given distance, increases with their magnitude (Moyer & Landauer, 1967). One detailed quantitative framework to account for these effects is provided by random walk models. These chronometric models describe how number-related noisy…

In choice reaction time (RT) tasks, performance is often influenced by the presence of nominally irrelevant stimuli, referred to as distractors. Recent research provided evidence that distractor processing can be adjusted to the utility of the distractors: Distractors predictive of the upcoming target/response were more attended to and also…

Depending on the degree to which the original study context is accessible, selective memory retrieval can be detrimental or beneficial for the recall of other memories (Bäuml & Samenieh, 2012). Prior work has shown that the detrimental effect of memory retrieval is typically recall specific and does not arise after restudy trials, whereas…