The Hebb repetition effect shows improvement in serial recall of repeated lists compared to random nonrepeated lists. Previous research using simple span tasks found that the Hebb repetition effect is limited to constant uninterrupted lists, suggesting chunking as the mechanism of list learning. However, the Hebb repetition effect has been found…

In a typical probabilistic cuing experiment, participants are asked to find a visual target among a series of distractors. Although participants are not informed about this, the target appears more frequently in one region of the display, resulting in faster search times for targets located in this region. This bias is thought to depend on a…

Knowing what one knows and accurately monitoring one's own capacities and performance on a moment-to-moment basis are important determinants of task success. Individual differences in such metacognitive monitoring are well documented, but what determines an individual's monitoring accuracy in a particular context is yet to be fully understood. One…

Ongoing discussions on the nature of storage in visual working memory have mostly focused on 2 theoretical accounts: On one hand we have a discrete-state account, postulating that information in working memory is supported with high fidelity for a limited number of discrete items by a given number of "slots," with no information being…

Working memory (WM) has a limited capacity; however, this limitation can be mitigated by selecting individual items from the set currently held in WM for prioritization. The selection mechanism underlying this prioritization ability is referred to as the focus of attention (FOA) in WM. Although impressive progress has been achieved in recent…

Eight experiments (N = 2,003) assessed the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and performance on the antisaccade task. Experiments 1-5 and 7 examined individual differences in aspects of goal management processes occurring during the preparatory delay of the antisaccade task. WMC tended to interact with delay interval suggesting that…

Several working memory (WM) theories assume a resource sharing between the maintenance of information and its processing, whereas other theories suppose that these 2 functions of WM rely on different pools of resources. Studies that addressed this question by examining whether dual-task costs occur in tasks combining processing and storage have…

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…

To recall a list of items just after the end of the presentation, participants must encode both the items and the order in which they were presented. Despite a long history of studying item and order information, little is known regarding the relation between them. Here, we examined this issue with a novel task in which participants saw two 4- or…

The processing of ordinally organized information is a characteristic of both serial-order working memory and numerical cognition. Serial positions of items presented within a list follow an ordinal organization when stored in working memory, whereas numbers are based on an ordinal structure stored in long-term memory. We tested the hypothesis…

Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., "polarity effect"). We present evidence that two factors contribute to the polarity effect in verification tasks: processing the sentence and verifying its truth value. To quantify the relative contribution of each, we used a delayed verification task.…

Previous research indicates that long-term memory (LTM) may contribute to performance in working memory (WM) tasks. Across 3 experiments, we investigated the extent to which active maintenance in WM can be replaced by relying on information stored in episodic LTM, thereby freeing capacity for additional information in WM. First, participants…

Collaborative inhibition (reduced recall in collaborative vs. nominal groups) is a robust phenomenon. However, it is possible that not everyone is as susceptible to collaborative inhibition, such as those higher in working memory capacity (WMC). In the current study, we examined the relationship between WMC and collaborative inhibition.…

Participants gave recognition judgments for short lists of pictures of everyday objects. Pictures in a given list were an equal mixture of three types that varied according to the way they were used as targets and foils earlier in the same session. Under consistent-mapping (CM), targets and foils never switch roles; under varied-mapping (VM),…

Recent research has found that maintaining an item in working memory improves subsequent long-term memory performance. The present study explored the role of working memory consolidation in long-term recognition. Participants completed a stimuli-identification task followed by a surprise delayed recognition task. Participants first identified…