Spatial memories are often organized around reference frames, and environmental shape provides a salient cue to reference frame selection. To date, however, the environmental cues responsible for influencing reference frame selection remain relatively unknown. To connect research on reference frame selection with that on orientation via…

Four experiments tested whether there are enduring spatial representations of objects' locations in memory. Previous studies have shown that under certain conditions the internal consistency of pointing to objects using memory is disrupted by disorientation. This disorientation effect has been attributed to an absence of or to imprecise enduring…

The body specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009) posits that the way in which people interact with the world affects their mental representation of information. For instance, right- versus left-handedness affects the mental representation of affective valence, with right-handers categorically associating good with rightward areas and bad with…

Philosophers use hypothetical duplication scenarios to explore intuitions about personal identity. Here we examined 5- to 6-year-olds' intuitions about the physical properties and memories of a live hamster that is apparently duplicated by a machine. In Study 1, children thought that more of the original's physical properties than episodic…

Previous studies have indicated cross cultural differences in conscious processes, such that Asians have a global preference and Westerners a more analytical one. We investigated whether these biases also apply to unconscious knowledge. In Experiment 1, Japanese and UK participants memorized strings of large (global) letters made out of small…

Prospective memory (PM) involves forming intentions, retaining those intentions, and later executing those intended responses at the appropriate time. Few studies have investigated this capacity in animals. Monkeys performed a computerized task that assessed their ability to remember to make a particular response if they observed a PM cue embedded…

Studies like the one conducted by Domahs et al. (2010, in Cognition) corroborate that finger counting habits affect how numbers are processed, and legitimize the assumption that this effect is culturally modulated. The degree of cultural diversity in finger counting, however, has been grossly underestimated in the field at large, which, in turn,…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the controlled versus the automatic nature of temporal preparation. If temporal preparation involves controlled rather than automatic processing, it should be reduced by the addition of a concurrent demanding task. This hypothesis was tested by comparing participants' performance in a temporal…

Evolutionary psychologists propose that human cognition evolved through natural selection to solve adaptive problems related to survival and reproduction, with its ultimate function being the enhancement of reproductive fitness. Following this proposal and the evolutionary-developmental view that ancestral selection pressures operated not only on…

We newly propose that the vigilance decrement occurs because the cognitive control system fails to maintain active the goal of the vigilance task over prolonged periods of time (goal habituation). Further, we hypothesized that momentarily deactivating this goal (via a switch in tasks) would prevent the activation level of the vigilance goal from…

Presenting inconsistent postevent information about a witnessed incident typically decreases the accuracy of memory reports concerning that event (the "misinformation effect"). Surprisingly, the "reversibility" of the effect (after an initial occurrence) has remained largely unexplored. Based on a "memory conversion" theoretical framework and…

Previous research has demonstrated that, presumably as a way to protect one's current romantic relationship, individuals involved in a heterosexual romantic relationship tend to give lower attractiveness ratings to attractive opposite-sex others as compared to uninvolved individuals (i.e., the "derogation effect"). The present study importantly…

Flashbacks are involuntary, emotion-laden images experienced by individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The qualities of flashbacks could under certain circumstances lead to source memory errors. Participants with PTSD wrote a trauma narrative and reported the experience of flashbacks. They were later presented with stimuli from…

Fluency, the subjective experience of ease associated with information processing, has been shown to affect a host of judgments. Previous research has typically focused on specific factors that affect the use of a single, specific fluency source. In the present study we examine how cognitive mindsets, or processing modes, moderate fluency…

An unexpected stimulus often remains unnoticed if attention is focused elsewhere. This inattentional blindness has been shown to be increased under conditions of high memory load. Here we show that increasing working memory load can also have the opposite effect of reducing inattentional blindness (i.e., improving stimulus detection) if stimulus…