Memory for emotional events is usually very good even when tested shortly after study, before it is altered by the influence of emotional arousal on consolidation. Immediate emotion-enhanced memory may stem from the influence of emotion on cognitive processes at encoding and retrieval. Our goal was to test which cognitive factors are necessary and…

We argue that the semantic analysis of task-irrelevant stimuli is modulated by feature-specific attention allocation. In line with this hypothesis, we found semantic priming of pronunciation responses to depend upon the extent to which participants focused their attention upon specific semantic stimulus dimensions. In Experiment 1, we examined the…

The present study evaluated the interplay between two mechanisms of maintenance of verbal information in working memory, namely articulatory rehearsal as described in Baddeley's model, and attentional refreshing as postulated in Barrouillet and Camos's Time-Based Resource-Sharing (TBRS) model. In four experiments using complex span paradigm, we…

Two experiments explored the representational basis for anticipatory eye movements. Participants heard "the man will drink ..." or "the man has drunk ..." (Experiment 1) or "the man will drink all of ..." or "the man has drunk all of ..." (Experiment 2). They viewed a concurrent scene depicting a full glass of beer and an empty wine glass (amongst…

Experiments 1 and 2 examined the time-course of retrieval of phonological, visual-shape and semantic knowledge as Dutch participants listened to sentences and looked at displays of four pictures. Given a sentence with "beker," "beaker," for example, the display contained phonological (a beaver, "bever"), shape (a…

Evidence from recent experiments that monitored attention in clipart scenes during spoken comprehension suggests that people preferably rely on non-stereotypical depicted events over stereotypical thematic knowledge for incremental interpretation. "The Coordinated Interplay Account [Knoeferle, P., & Crocker, M. W. (2006). "The coordinated…

Two experiments are reported that examine how manipulations of visual attention affect speakers' linguistic choices regarding word order, verb use and syntactic structure when describing simple pictured scenes. Experiment 1 presented participants with scenes designed to elicit the use of a perspective predicate ("The man chases the dog/The dog…