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…

The temporal contiguity effect (TCE) is the tendency for the recall of one event to cue recall of other events originally experienced nearby in time. Retrieved context theory proposes that the TCE results from fundamental properties of episodic memory: binding of events to a drifting context representation during encoding and the reinstatement of…

In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Response…

Visual search for targets in repeated displays is more efficient than search for the same targets in random distractor layouts. Previous work has shown that this contextual cueing is severely impaired under central vision loss. Here, we investigated whether central vision loss, simulated with gaze-contingent displays, prevents the incidental…

According to the retrieved context theory of episodic memory, the cue for recall of an item is a weighted sum of recently activated cognitive states, including previously recalled and studied items as well as their associations. We show that this theory predicts there should be compound cuing in free recall. Specifically, the temporal contiguity…

In order to examine metacognitive accuracy (i.e., the relationship between metacognitive judgment and memory performance), researchers often rely on by-participant analysis, where metacognitive accuracy (e.g., resolution, as measured by the gamma coefficient or signal detection measures) is computed for each participant and the computed values are…

According to the principle of relative-strength competition, stronger items in memory block the retrieval of weaker items. This principle, integral to many theories of forgetting over the years, derives much of its support from the list-strength effect (LSE), in which strengthening some items in a study list makes it more difficult to recall other…

A single-system computational model of priming and recognition was applied to studies that have looked at the relationship between priming, recognition, and fluency in continuous identification paradigms. The model was applied to 3 findings that have been interpreted as evidence for a multiple-systems account: (a) priming can occur for items not…

Choice strategies for selecting among outcomes in multiple-cue probability learning were investigated using a simulated medical diagnosis task. Expected choice probabilities (the proportion of times each outcome was selected given each cue pattern) under alternative choice strategies were constructed from corresponding observed judged…