The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate…

Numerous studies have found better memory for multimodal than unimodal stimuli. In these studies, however, multimodal stimuli consist not only of multiple modalities, but also of more varied information than unimodal. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated encoding variability as an explanation for the multisensory benefit. Written words…

Current views posit that forming and retrieving memories of ongoing events influences action control. However, the organizational structure of these memories, or event files, remains unclear. The "hierarchical coding view" posits a hierarchical structure, wherein task sets occupy a high level of the hierarchy. Here, the contents of an…

Spatial memory is important for supporting the successful completion of everyday activities and is a particularly vulnerable domain in late life. Grouping items together in memory, or chunking, can improve spatial memory performance. In memory for desktop scale spaces and well-learned large-scale environments, error patterns suggest that…

Why does it take less time to remember an event than to experience it? Recent evidence suggests that the dynamic unfolding of events is temporally compressed in memory representations, but the exact nature of this compression mechanism remains unclear. The present study tested two possible mechanisms. First, it could be that memories compress the…

In describing how people generalize from observed samples of data to novel cases, theories of inductive inference have emphasized the learner's reliance on the contents of the sample. More recently, a growing body of literature suggests that different assumptions about how a data sample was generated can lead the learner to draw qualitatively…

Value-directed remembering refers to the tendency to best remember important information at the expense of less valuable information, and this ability may draw on strategic attentional processes. In six experiments, we investigated the role of attention in value-directed remembering by examining memory for important information under conditions of…

Eye-tracking methodologies have revealed that eye movements and pupil dilations are influenced by our previous experiences. Dynamic fluctuations in pupil size during learning reflect in part the formation of memories for learned information, while viewing behavior during memory testing is influenced by memory retrieval and drawn to previously…

Disfluencies such as pauses, "um"s, and "uh"s are common interruptions in the speech stream. Previous work probing memory for disfluent speech shows memory benefits for disfluent compared to fluent materials. Complementary evidence from studies of language production and comprehension have been argued to show that different…

Assessing the time course under which underlying memory representations can be formed is an important question for understanding memory. Several studies assessing item memory have shown that gist representations of items are laid out more rapidly than verbatim representations. However, for associations among items/components, which form the core…

Responding to a prospective memory task in the course of an ongoing activity requires switching tasks, which typically comes at a cost in performing the ongoing activity. Similarly, when the prospective memory task is deactivated, a cost can occur when previously relevant prospective memory targets appear in the course of the ongoing activity. In…

Event-based prospective memory (PM) tasks require individuals to remember to perform a previously planned action when they encounter a specific event. Often, the natural environments in which PM tasks occur are embedded are constantly changing, requiring humans to adapt by learning. We examine one such adaptation by integrating PM target learning…

Memory retrieval affects subsequent memory in ways both positive (e.g., the testing effect) and negative (e.g., retrieval-induced forgetting, RIF). The changes to memory that retrieval produces can be thought of as the encoding consequences of retrieval, examined here with respect to attention. In three experiments, participants first studied…

While our perceptual experience seems to unfold continuously over time, episodic memory preserves distinct events for storage and recollection. Previous work shows that stability in encoding context serves to temporally bind individual items into sequential composite events. This phenomenon has been almost exclusively studied using visual and…

Reasoning about verbal analogies requires selective retrieval of relevant relational information. A consequence of this may be that inhibitory processes in memory cause reduced recall of information associated with analogy-irrelevant relations. The current experiments apply the retrieval-induced forgetting framework to investigate the potential…