We investigated the mechanisms by which fillers, such as "uh" and "um", affect memory for discourse. Participants listened to and attempted to recall recorded passages adapted from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". The type and location of interruptions were manipulated through digital splicing. In Experiment 1, we tested a processing time…

Recent masked priming experiments have brought to light a morphological level of analysis that is exclusively based on the orthographic appearance of words, so that it breaks down corner into corn- and -er, as well as dealer into deal- and -er (Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). Being insensitive to semantic factors, this morpho-orthographic…

Emotionality is a key component of subjective experience that influences memory. We tested how the emotionality of words affects memory monitoring, specifically, judgments of learning, in both cued recall and free recall paradigms. In both tasks, people predicted that positive and negative emotional words would be recalled better than neutral…

Three experiments tested predictions of a neural network model of phonological short-term memory that assumes separate representations for order and item information, order being coded via a context-timing signal [Burgess, N., & Hitch, G. J. (1999). Memory for serial order: A network model of the phonological loop and its timing. "Psychological…

Thinking about the meaning of studied words (deep processing) enhances memory on typical recognition tests, relative to focusing on perceptual features (shallow processing). One explanation for this levels-of-processing effect is that deep processing leads to the encoding of more distinctive representations (i.e., more unique semantic or…

Reports two experiments on mechanism of interference in working memory. Experiment 1 shows that a target word in a memory list, which bears high similarity to one of 4 words read aloud in the retention interval, is recalled less well than a control word. A second target word, not similar to any word read aloud but with all its phonemes repeated…

Four experiments examined subjective experience during retrieval in the DRM false memory paradigm [Deese, J. (1959). "On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall." "Journal of Experimental Psychology," 58, 17-22; Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). "Creating false memories: Remembering words not…

When items on one list receive more encoding than items on another list, the improvement in performance usually manifests as an increase in the hit rate and a decrease in the false alarm rate (FAR). A common account of this strength based mirror effect is that participants adopt a more strict criterion following a strongly than weakly encoded list…

Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to make several linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to consider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether a…

A single-system model of repetition priming and recognition memory is presented, which is conceptually similar to signal-detection theory. Key assumptions of the model are (a) that the same memory source contributes to both priming and recognition performance and (b) that variance of the noise associated with priming measures is greater than…

Several competing theories of short-term memory can explain serial recall performance at a quantitative level. However, most theories to date have not been applied to the accompanying pattern of response latencies, thus ignoring a rich and highly diagnostic aspect of performance. This article explores and tests the error latency predictions of…