Current views posit that forming and retrieving memories of ongoing events influences action control. However, the organizational structure of these memories, or event files, remains unclear. The "hierarchical coding view" posits a hierarchical structure, wherein task sets occupy a high level of the hierarchy. Here, the contents of an…

In describing how people generalize from observed samples of data to novel cases, theories of inductive inference have emphasized the learner's reliance on the contents of the sample. More recently, a growing body of literature suggests that different assumptions about how a data sample was generated can lead the learner to draw qualitatively…

Autism spectrum disorder is a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. The symptoms invariably appear in early childhood and cause significant impairment in social, occupational, and other important…

The present study evaluates the updating of long-term memory for duration. After learning a temporal discrimination associating one lever with a standard duration (4 sec) and another lever with both a shorter (1-sec) and a longer (16-sec) duration, rats underwent a single session for learning a new standard duration. The temporal generalization…

Repeated study typically improves episodic memory performance. Two different types of explanations of this phenomenon have been put forward: (1) reactivating the same representations strengthens and stabilizes memories, or (2) greater encoding variability benefits memory by promoting richer traces. The present experiment directly compared these…

A striking characteristic of human thought is that we form representations about abstract kinds (Giraffes have purple tongues), despite experiencing only particular individuals (This giraffe has a purple tongue). These generic generalizations have been hypothesized to be a cognitive default, that is, more basic and automatic than other forms of…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that--beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations--people are "biased" to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit…

Integrative encoding and generalization across past experiences depends largely on the hippocampus, an area known to be particularly sensitive to stress. Yet, whether stress influences the ability to generalize memories is unknown. We exposed volunteers to a stressor or a control manipulation before they completed an acquired equivalence task…

Animal studies suggest that time delay between acquisition and retrieval of contextual anxiety increases generalization. Moreover, such generalization is prevented by preexposure to the context (CTX), presumably due to an improved representation of such context. We investigated whether preexposure and time-passing modulate generalization of…

Consolidation and reconsolidation are phases of memory stabilization that diverge slightly. Noradrenaline is known to influence both processes, but the relative contribution of alpha1- and beta-adrenoceptors is unclear. The present study sought to investigate this matter by comparing their recruitment to consolidate and/or reconsolidate a…

Recent work (e.g., Nairne & Pandeirada, 2010) has shown that words are remembered better when they have been processed for their survival value in a grasslands context than when processed in other contexts. It has been suggested that this is because human memory systems were shaped by evolution specifically to help humans survive. Thus far,…

In 2 studies, the authors examined the development of the relationship between inductive reasoning and visual recognition memory. In both studies, 5- to 6-year-old children and adults were shown instances of a basic-level category (dogs) followed by a test set containing old and new category members that varied in their similarity to study items.…

Research from the adaptive memory framework shows that thinking about words in terms of their survival value in an incidental learning task enhances their free recall relative to other semantic encoding strategies and intentional learning (Nairne, Pandeirada, & Thompson, 2008). We found similar results. When participants used incidental…

Reports that infants in the second year of life can attribute false beliefs to others have all used a "search" paradigm in which an agent with a false belief about an object's location searches for the object. The present research asked whether 18-month-olds would still demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with a novel "non-search"…