The recognition memory receiver operating characteristic (ROC) is typically asymmetric with a characteristic elevation of the left-hand portion. Whereas the unequal variance signal detection model (uvsd) assumes the asymmetry results because old item evidence is noisier than new item evidence, the dual process signal detection model (dpsd) assumes…

The increased Simon effect with increasing the ratio of congruent trials may be interpreted by both attention modulation and irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations learning accounts, although the reversed Simon effect with increasing the ratio of incongruent trials provides evidence supporting the latter account. To investigate if…

This article reports an eye-movement experiment in which participants scanned continuous sequences of Landolt-Cs for target circles to examine the visual and oculomotor constraints that might jointly determine where the eyes move in a task that engages many of the perceptual and motor processes involved in Chinese reading but without lexical or…

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…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

Categorical perception (CP) effects manifest as faster or more accurate discrimination between objects that come from different categories compared with objects that come from the same category, controlling for the physical differences between the objects. The most popular explanations of CP effects have relied on perceptual warping causing…

In a highly systematic literature, researchers have investigated the manner in which people make feature inferences in paradigms involving uncertain categorizations (e.g., Griffiths, Hayes, & Newell, 2012; Murphy & Ross, 1994, 2007, 2010a). Although researchers have discussed the implications of the results for models of categorization and…

Novel phonotactic constraints can be acquired by hearing or speaking syllables that follow a novel constraint. When learned from hearing syllables, these newly learned constraints generalize to syllables that were not experienced during training. However, generalization of phonotactic learning to novel syllables has never been persuasively…

Readers tend to skip words, particularly when they are short, frequent, or predictable. Angele and Rayner (2013) recently reported that readers are often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision. In the present study, we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates…

Adelman, Marquis, Sabatos-DeVito, and Estes (2013) collected word naming latencies from 4 participants who read 2,820 words 50 times each. Their recommendation and practice was that R2 targets set for models should take into account subject idiosyncrasies as replicable patterns, equivalent to a subjects-as-fixed-effects assumption. In light of an…

Koen and Yonelinas (2010) contrasted the recollection and encoding variability accounts of the finding that old items are associated with more variable memory strength than new items. The study indicated that (a) increasing encoding variability did not lead to increased measures of old item variance, and (b) old item variance was directly related…

Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…

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…

Elwin, Juslin, Olsson, and Enkvist (2007) and Henriksson, Elwin, and Juslin (2010) offered the constructivist coding hypothesis to describe how people code the outcomes of their decisions when availability of feedback is conditional on the decision. They provided empirical evidence only for the 0.5 base rate condition. This commentary argues that…

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…