The present study examined individual differences in everyday cognitive failures assessed by diaries. A large sample of participants completed various cognitive ability measures in the laboratory. Furthermore, a subset of these participants also recorded everyday cognitive failures (attention, retrospective memory, and prospective memory failures)…

The Less is More hypothesis suggests that one reason adults and children differ in their ability to learn language is that they also differ in other cognitive capacities. According to one version of this hypothesis, children's relatively poor memory may make them more likely to regularize inconsistent input (Hudson Kam & Newport, 2005, 2009). This…

The response-signal speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure was used to provide an in-depth investigation of the impact of aging on the dynamics of short-term memory retrieval. Young and older adults studied sequentially presented 3-item lists, immediately followed by a recognition probe. Analyses of composite list and serial position SAT…

Construction of imaginative or fictitious events requires the flexible recombination of stored information into novel representations. How this process is accomplished is not understood fully. To address this problem, older adults (mean age = 74.2; Experiment 1) and younger patients with MTL lesions (mean age = 54.2; Experiment 2), both of whom…

The relation between intrusions in several different recall tasks was examined in the current study. Intrusions from these tasks were moderately correlated and formed a unitary intrusion factor. This factor was related to other cognitive ability measures including working memory capacity, judgments of recency, and general source-monitoring…

The current study examined the extent to which attention control abilities, secondary memory abilities, or both accounted for variation in working memory capacity (WMC) and its relation to fluid intelligence. Participants performed various attention control, secondary memory, WMC, and fluid intelligence measures. Confirmatory factor analyses…

This paper reports the results of four dual-task experiments that were designed to determine the extent of domain-specificity of the verbal working memory resources used in linguistic integrations. To address this question, syntactic complexity was crossed in a 2x2 design with the complexity of a secondary task, which involved either (1)…

Complex working memory span tasks have been shown to predict performance on a number of measures of higher-order cognition including fluid abilities. However, exactly why performance on these tasks is related to higher-order cognition is still not known. The present study examined the patterns of errors made on two common complex span tasks. The…

Performance on a wide variety of memory tasks can be hypothesized to be influenced by processes associated with controlling the contents of memory. In this project 328 adults ranging from 18 to 93 years of age performed six tasks (e.g., multiple trial recall with an interpolated interference list, directed forgetting, proactive interference, and…

Simultaneous interpreting is a complex skill in which language comprehension and production take place at the same time in two languages. In this study, we examined performance on basic language and working memory tasks that have been hypothesized to engage cognitive skills important for simultaneous interpreting. The participants were native…