Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search…

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…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

Though there is substantial evidence that individuals can prioritize more valuable information in visual working memory (WM), little research has examined this in the verbal domain. Four experiments were conducted to investigate this and the conditions under which effects emerge. In each experiment, participants listened to digit sequences and…

Identifying unfamiliar faces is surprisingly error-prone, even for experienced professionals who perform this task regularly. Previous attempts to train this ability have been largely unsuccessful, leading many to conclude that face identity processing is hard-wired and not amenable to further perceptual learning. Here, we take a novel expert…

Existing approaches in the literature on cognitive control in conflict tasks almost exclusively target the outcome of control (by comparing mean congruency effects) and not the processes that shape control. These approaches are limited in addressing a current theoretical issue--what contribution does learning make to adjustments in cognitive…

In judgment and categorization, the task is to infer the criterion value of an object based on cues. The cognitive mechanisms underlying such inferences are often distinguished in terms of whether they rely on an abstracted cue-criterion rule or on retrieving exemplars. The use of cue-based and exemplar-based strategies (and the associated…

Although episodic and semantic memory share overlapping neural mechanisms, it remains unclear how our pre-existing semantic associations modulate the formation of new, episodic associations. When freely recalling recently studied words, people rely on both episodic and semantic associations, shown through temporal and semantic clustering of…

Over the past decade an increasing number of studies across a range of domains have shown that the repeated performance of approach and avoidance (AA) actions in response to a stimulus leads to changes in the evaluation of that stimulus. The dominant (motivational-systems) account in this area claims that these effects are caused by a rewiring of…

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…

Cognitive control refers to adjusting thoughts and actions when confronted with conflict during information processing. We tested whether this ability is causally linked to performance on certain language and memory tasks by using cognitive control training to systematically modulate people's ability to resolve information-conflict across domains.…

Reasoning and inference are well-studied aspects of basic cognition that have been explained as statistically optimal Bayesian inference. Using a simplified experimental design, we conducted quantitative comparisons between Bayesian inference and human inference at the level of individuals. In 3 experiments, with more than 13,000 participants, we…

Sleep deprivation adversely affects the ability to perform cognitive tasks, but theories range from predicting an overall decline in cognitive functioning because of reduced stability in attentional networks to specific deficits in various cognitive domains or processes. We measured the effects of sleep deprivation on two memory tasks, item…

Maljkovic and Nakayama (1994) found that pop-out search performance is more efficient when a singleton target feature repeats rather than switches from 1 trial to the next--an effect known as priming of pop-out (PoP). They also reported findings indicating that the PoP effect is strongly automatic, as it was unaffected by knowledge of the upcoming…

The distinction between similarity-based and rule-based strategies has instigated a large body of research in categorization and judgment. Within both domains, the task characteristics guiding strategy shifts are increasingly well documented. Across domains, past research has observed shifts from rule-based strategies in judgment to…