Although difficulties processing both symbolic and nonsymbolic proportion compared with absolute number are well established, the mechanisms involved remain unclear. We investigate four potential explanations to account for better number processing in adulthood: (a) number is more salient than proportion, (b) number is encoded more automatically…

Testing can potentiate new learning, which is often called the "forward testing effect." One potential explanation for this benefit is that testing might enable participants to use more effective learning strategies subsequently. We investigated this possibility by asking participants to report their encoding strategies in a multi-list…

How working memory supports dual-task performance is the focus of a long-standing debate. Most previous research on this topic has focused on participant performance data. In three experiments, we investigated whether changes in participant-reported strategies across single- and dual-task conditions might help resolve this debate by offering new…

Learning to choose adaptively when faced with uncertain and variable outcomes is a central challenge for decision makers. This study examines repeated choice in dynamic probability learning tasks in which outcome probabilities changed either as a function of the choices participants made or independently of those choices. This presence/absence of…

Upon hearing a novel word, language learners must identify its correct meaning from a diverse set of situationally relevant options. Such referential ambiguity could be reduced through "repetitive" exposure to the novel word across diverging learning situations, a learning mechanism referred to as "cross-situational learning."…

Researchers have proposed that an explicit reasoning system is responsible for learning rule-based category structures and that a separate implicit, procedural-learning system is responsible for learning information-integration category structures. As evidence for this multiple-system hypothesis, researchers report a dissociation based on…

Visual working memory (WM) is traditionally considered a robust form of visual representation that survives changes in object motion, observer's position, and other visual transients. This article presents data that are inconsistent with the traditional view. We show that memory sensitivity is dramatically influenced by small variations in the…

Reports an error in "Testing during study insulates against the buildup of proactive interference" by Karl K. Szpunar, Kathleen B. McDermott and Henry L. Roediger III ("Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," 2008[Nov], Vol 34[6], 1392-1399). Incorrect figures were printed due to an error in the…

Category number effects on rule-based and information-integration category learning were investigated. Category number affected accuracy and the distribution of best-fitting models in the rule-based task but had no effect on accuracy and little effect on the distribution of best-fining models in the information-integration task. In the 2 category…

Four experiments investigated transformation problems with insight characteristics. In Experiment 1, performance on a version of the 6-coin problem that had a concrete and visualizable solution followed a hill-climbing heuristic. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the difficulty of a version of the problem that potentially required insight for…

The authors examined whether absolute and relative judgments about global-scale locations and distances were generated from common representations. At the end of a 10-week class on the regional geography of the United States, participants estimated the latitudes of 16 North American cities and all possible pairwise distances between them. Although…