This study investigated the processes reflected in the widely observed N400 and P600 event-related potential (ERP) effects and tested the hypothesis that the N400 and P600 effects are functionally linked in a tradeoff relationship, constrained in part by individual differences in cognitive ability. Sixty participants read sentences, and ERP…

Two main mechanisms, articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing, are argued to be involved in the maintenance of verbal information in working memory (WM). Whereas converging research has suggested that rehearsal promotes the phonological representations of memoranda in working memory, little is known about the representations that…

Response congruency effects in task switching reflect worse performance for incongruent targets associated with different responses across tasks than for congruent targets associated with the same response. In the present study, the author investigated whether the effects can be produced solely by a mediated route for response selection, whereby…

Difficulties in person recognition are among the common complaints associated with cognitive ageing. The present series of experiments therefore investigated face and person recognition in young and older adults. The authors examined how within-domain and cross-domain repetition as well as semantic priming affect familiar face recognition and…

When memory is tested, researchers are often interested in the items that were correctly recalled or recognized, while ignoring or factoring out trials where one "recalls" or "recognizes" a nonstudied item. However, intrusions and false alarms are more than nuisance data and can provide key insights into the memory system. The…