People often misrecognize objects that are similar to those they have previously encountered. These mnemonic discrimination errors are attributed to shared memory representations (gist) typically characterized in terms of meaning. In two experiments, we investigated multiple semantic and perceptual relations that may contribute: at the concept…

Perception is driven not only by current stimulation but also by previous sensory experience, which may serve as a perceptual prior for stimulus processing. A possible mechanism underlying this phenomenon is formalized in the internal reference model, which assumes that humans rely on an internal reference that updates continuously by integrating…

Little is known about the mental representation of large multidigit numbers that are usually beyond our personal experience. The present study explored the processing mechanisms of these numbers in a series of experiments, using the numerical comparison task. Experiment 1 included within and between-scale comparisons of multidigit numbers varying…

Categorization researchers have long debated the possibility of multiple category-learning systems. The need persists for paradigms that dissociate explicit-declarative category-learning processes (featuring verbalizable category rules) from implicit-procedural processes (featuring stimulus-response associations lying beneath declarative…

A fundamental aspect of decision making is the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT): slower decisions tend to be more accurate, but because time is a scarce resource people prefer to conclude decisions more quickly. The current research adds to the SAT literature by documenting two previously unrecognized influences on the SAT: perception shifts and goal…

Events and activities consist not only of sequences of individual actions, but also they form hierarchies comprising chains of low-level actions grouped together to form higher level activities. Therefore, observers face the task of not only segmenting a continuous event stream into discrete units, but also processing these units on an appropriate…

Signal detection theory is one of psychology's most well-known and influential theoretical frameworks. However, the conceptual hurdles that had to be overcome before the theory could finally emerge in its modern form in the early 1950s seem to have been largely forgotten. Here, I trace the origins of signal detection theory, beginning with…

Although the correlation between general cognitive ability ("g") and performance on speeded cognitive tasks is well-established, there is need for a better understanding of how successive stages of processing contribute to this relationship. Previous research suggests that "g" is primarily associated with the rapidity of…

Generalization of learning can arise from 2 distinct sources: failure to discriminate a novel test stimulus from the trained stimulus and active extrapolation from the trained stimulus to the test stimulus despite them being discriminable. We investigated these 2 processes in a predictive learning task by testing stimulus discriminability…

If a target stimulus is presented together with a response-irrelevant distractor stimulus, both stimuli can be encoded together with the response in an event file (see Hommel, 2004). The repetition of any feature of such an event-file can then retrieve the previously encoded response. This kind of feature-based retrieval is an important mechanism…

The evaluative conditioning (EC) phenomenon is central to the study of preference acquisition and attitude formation. Early studies have reported EC in the absence of awareness, but more recent work has questioned this conclusion. In previous work, using briefly presented and pattern-masked conditioned stimuli (CSs), we found that above-chance…

Sarcasm is commonly used in everyday language; however, little is currently known about cultural and individual differences in sarcasm interpretation and use, particularly across Western and Eastern cultures. To address these gaps in the literature, the present study investigated individual differences in sarcasm interpretation and use in the UK…

The role of awareness in evaluative learning has been thoroughly investigated with a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. We investigated evaluative conditioning (EC) without awareness with an approach that conceptually provides optimal conditions for unaware learning - the Continuous Flash Suppression paradigm (CFS). In CFS, a…

How does the concurrent use of language affect perception and memory for exemplars? Labels cue more general category information than a specific exemplar. Applying labels can affect the resulting memory for an exemplar. Here 3 alternative hypotheses are proposed for the role of labeling an exemplar at encoding: (a) labels distort memory toward the…

Two experiments are presented that use tasks common in research in numerical cognition with young adults and older adults as subjects. In these tasks, one or two arrays of dots are displayed, and subjects decide whether there are more or fewer dots of one kind than another. Results show that older adults, relative to young adults, tend to rely…