Previous research has linked working memory capacity (WMC) with enhanced proactive control. However, it remains unclear the extent to which this relationship reflects the influence of WMC on the tendency to engage proactive control, or rather, the ability to implement it. The current study sought to clarify this ambiguity by leveraging the Dual…

Information can be conveyed via multiple channels such as verbal and gestural (visual) channels during communication. Sometimes the information from different channels does not match (e.g., saying right while pointing to the left). How do addressees choose which information to act upon in such cases? In two experiments, we investigated this issue…

In the field of stimulus generalization, an old yet unresolved discussion pertains to what extent stimulus misidentifications contribute to the pattern of conditioned responding. In this article, we perform cluster analysis on six datasets (four published datasets and two unpublished datasets, included N = 950) to examine the relationship between…

People vary in their performance on visual working memory tasks, and these individual differences covary with a wide range of higher-level cognitive processes including fluid intelligence. Performance also varies across study displays, purportedly driven by both low- and higher-level processes. Understanding what causes these sources of systematic…

Although models of word meanings based on distributional semantics have proved effective in predicting human judgments of similarity among individual concepts, it is less clear whether or how such models might be extended to account for judgments of similarity among relations between concepts. Here we combine an individual-differences approach…

Valued-based decision-making has been studied for decades in myriad topics such as consumer spending and gambling, but very rarely in spatial navigation despite the link between the two being highly relevant to survival. Furthermore, how people integrate episodic memories, and what factors are related to the extent of memory integration in…

In the cocktail party phenomenon, participants cannot attend to more than 1 stream of information, but sometimes detect their own name being presented in the irrelevant message during a selective listening task. Here we present a preregistered replication of the phenomenon, in which we also tested whether semantically unexpected words have a…

The samples of evidence we use to make inferences in everyday and formal settings are often subject to selection biases. Two property induction experiments examined group and individual sensitivity to one type of selection bias: sampling frames - causal constraints that only allow certain types of instances to be sampled. Group data from both…

Mental model (Johnson-Laird, 2001) and probabilistic theories (Oaksford & Chater, 2009) claim to provide distinct explanations of human reasoning. However, the dual strategy model of reasoning suggests that this distinction corresponds to different reasoning strategies, termed "counterexample" and "statistical,"…

Mind wandering is often defined as the phenomenon of one's attention drifting away from the current activity toward inner thoughts and feelings. In the laboratory, mind wandering is most frequently assessed with thought reports that are collected while people perform some ongoing activity. It is not clear, however, inasmuch the resulting…

Research suggests that forcing participants to withhold responding for as brief as 600 ms eliminates one of the most reliable findings in prospective memory (PM): the cue focality effect. This result undermines the conventional view that controlled attentional monitoring processes support PM, and instead suggests that cue detection results from…

It has been debated whether working memory (WM) performance is modulated by the valence of the stimuli that are being processed. A recent meta-analysis revealed that at the behavioral level and in individuals without mental health problems, mean-level performance differences in WM tasks with neutral versus affective conditions are small to…

Relying on shared tasks and stimuli to conduct research can enhance the replicability of findings and allow a community of researchers to collect large data sets across multiple experiments. This approach is particularly relevant for experiments in spatial navigation, which often require the development of unfamiliar large-scale virtual…

This study aims to advance our understanding of the nature and source(s) of individual differences in pragmatic language behavior over the adult lifespan. Across four story continuation experiments, we probed adults' (N = 496 participants, ages 18-82) choice of referential forms (i.e., names vs. pronouns to refer to the main character). Our…

We used the timing of serial recall in several situations to reveal important aspects of recall groupings that participants construct and the reasons those groupings occur. We examined the timing of responses in the recall of digit strings within two published experiments. Cowan, Saults, Elliott, and Moreno (2002) examined memory for nine-item…