"Attribute-framing bias" reflects people's tendency to evaluate objects framed positively more favorably than the same objects framed negatively. Although biased by the framing valence, evaluations are nevertheless calibrated to the magnitude of the target attribute. In three experiments that manipulated magnitudes in different ways, we…

People often rely on the covariation between events to infer causality. However, covariation between cues and outcomes may change over time. In the associative learning literature, extinction provides a model to study updating of causal beliefs when a previously established relationship no longer holds. Prediction error theories can explain both…

Stimulus-response binding and retrieval (SRBR) is a fundamental mechanism driving behavior automatization. In five experiments, we investigated the modulatory role of affective consequences (AC) on SRBR effects to test whether binding/retrieval can explain instrumental learning (i.e., the "law of effect"). SRBR effects were assessed in a…

In schema-based source monitoring, people mistakenly predict better source memory for expected sources (e.g., oven in the kitchen; "expectancy effect"), whereas actual source memory is better for unexpected sources (e.g., hairdryer in the kitchen; "inconsistency effect"; Schaper et al., 2019b). In three source-monitoring…

Attribute-framing bias reflects people's tendency to evaluate positively framed objects more favorably than the same objects framed negatively. Most theoretical accounts of this bias emphasized the role of positive- and negative-framing valence in the message, disregarding the quantitative information that typically accompanies it. To examine the…

Attribute-framing bias (AFB) refers to addressees' bias in evaluating positively framed objects (80% success) more favorably than negatively framed ones (20% failure), although they are logically equivalent. The novelty of the current study is in examining conditions in which AFB occurs or does not occur. Typically, AFB is examined for favorable…

Episodic memory involves flexible retrieval processes that allow us to link together distinct episodes, make novel inferences across overlapping events, and recombine elements of past experiences when imagining future events. However, the same flexible retrieval and recombination processes that underpin these adaptive functions may also leave…

In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their consequences. In this context, the way we represent contingencies can determine our ability to adapt to the environment. However, it is not clear how agents encode and organize available knowledge about the future to react to possible states of the…

Recent research shows that the judged likelihood of properties of modified nouns ("baby ducks have webbed feet") is reduced relative to judgments for unmodified nouns ("ducks have webbed feet"). This modification effect has been taken as evidence both for and against the idea that combined concepts automatically inherit…

Three experiments examined children's and adults' abilities to use statistical and temporal information to distinguish between common cause and causal chain structures. In Experiment 1, participants were provided with conditional probability information and/or temporal information and asked to infer the causal structure of a 3-variable mechanical…

In self-paced learning, when the regulation of study effort is goal driven (e.g., allocated to different items according to their relative importance), judgments of learning (JOLs) increase with study time. When regulation is data driven (e.g., determined by the ease of committing the item to memory), JOLs decrease with study time (Koriat,…

People consider alternative causes when deciding whether a cause is responsible for an effect (diagnostic inference) but appear to neglect them when deciding whether an effect will occur (predictive inference). Five experiments were conducted to test a 2-part explanation of this phenomenon: namely, (a) that people interpret standard predictive…

Interacting with a system is key to uncovering its causal structure. A computational framework for interventional causal learning has been developed over the last decade, but how real causal learners might achieve or approximate the computations entailed by this framework is still poorly understood. Here we describe an interactive computer task in…

This study shows that the presence of a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state--the sense that a word is in memory when its retrieval fails--is used as a heuristic for inferring that an inaccessible word has characteristics that are consistent with greater word perceptibility. When reporting a TOT state, people judged an unretrieved word as more likely to…

Weight is conceptualized as an embodiment of importance, according to recent research on embodied cognition (Ackerman, Nocera, & Bargh, 2010; Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009). Is importance as embodied by weight used as a cue that items are memorable? Four experiments varied participants' perceptual experiences of weight as they studied…