When remembering over the short-term, long-term knowledge has a large effect on the number of correctly recalled items and little impact on memory for order. This is true, for example, when the effects of semantic category are examined. Contrary to what these findings suggest, Poirier et al. in 2015 proposed that memory for order relies on the…

Research on quantitative judgments from multiple cues suggests that judgments are simultaneously influenced by previously abstracted knowledge about cue-criterion relations and memories of past instances (or exemplars). Yet extant judgment theories leave 2 questions unanswered: (a) How are past exemplars and abstracted cue knowledge combined to…

Recollection rejection is traditionally defined as using verbatim traces of old items' presentations to reject new similar test cues, in old/new recognition (e.g., rejecting that "couch" is old by retrieving verbatim traces of "sofa"'s presentation). We broaden this conceptualization to include (a) old as well as new similar…

Past research indicates that individuals respond adaptively to contextual factors in multiattribute choice tasks. Yet it remains unclear how this adaptation is cognitively governed. In this article, empirically testable implementations of two prominent competing theoretical frameworks are developed and compared across two multiattribute choice…

Three source-monitoring models were tested using the data of Bellezza, Elek, and Zhang (2016), who presented word pairs with each word in 1 of 4 locations. Given 1 word as a cue, participants had to remember the other word as well as the 2 corresponding locations. Results included (a) locations of the cue and target words were identified equally…

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 prospective memory (PM) research, costs (slowed responding to the ongoing task when a PM task is present relative to when it is not) have typically been interpreted as implicating an attentionally demanding monitoring process. To inform this interpretation, Heathcote, Loft, and Remington (2015), using an accumulator model, found that PM-related…

The two-high-threshold (2HT) model of recognition memory assumes that people make memory errors because they fail to retrieve information from memory and make a guess, whereas the continuous unequal-variance (UV) model and the low-threshold (LT) model assume that people make memory errors because they retrieve misleading information from memory.…

The authors investigated how humans use multiple landmarks to locate a goal. Participants searched for a hidden goal location along a line between 2 distinct landmarks on a computer screen. On baseline trials, the location of the landmarks and goal varied, but the distance between each of the landmarks and the goal was held constant, with 1…

The field of psychology of time has typically distinguished between prospective timing and retrospective duration estimation: in prospective timing, participants attend to and encode time, whereas in retrospective estimation, estimates are based on the memory of what happened. Prior research on prospective timing has primarily focused on…

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…

For multiattribute decision tasks, different metaphors exist that describe the process of decision making and its adaptation to diverse problems and situations. Multiple strategy models (MSMs) assume that decision makers choose adaptively from a set of different strategies (toolbox metaphor), whereas evidence accumulation models (EAMs) hold that a…

Repeating an item in a list benefits recall performance, and this benefit increases when the repetitions are spaced apart (Madigan, 1969; Melton, 1970). Retrieved context theory incorporates 2 mechanisms that account for these effects: contextual variability and study-phase retrieval. Specifically, if an item presented at position "i" is…

Intentional forgetting of previously learned information is an adaptive cognitive capability of humans but its cognitive underpinnings are not yet well understood. It has been argued that it strongly depends on the presentation method whether forgetting instructions alter storage or retrieval stages (Basden, Basden, & Gargano, 1993). In…

Humans are characterized by an especially highly developed ability to use instructions to prepare toward upcoming events; yet, it is unclear just how powerful instructions can be. Although prior work provides evidence that instructions can be sufficiently powerful to proactively program working memory to execute stimulus-response (S-R)…