The production effect is a well-established finding: If some words within a list are read aloud, that is, produced, they are better remembered than their silently read neighbors. The effect has been extensively studied with long-term memory tasks. Recently, using immediate serial recall and short-term order reconstruction, Saint-Aubin et al.…

Wakeful resting and listening to music are powerful means to modulate memory. How these activities affect memory when directly compared has not been tested so far. In two experiments, participants encoded and immediately recalled two word lists followed by either 6 min wakefully resting or 6 min listening to music. The results of Experiment 1 show…

Long-term memory knowledge is considered to impact short-term maintenance of item information in working memory, as opposed to short-term maintenance of serial order information. Evidence supporting an impact of semantic knowledge on serial order maintenance remains weak. In the present study, we demonstrate that semantic knowledge can impact the…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to complete a task at the appropriate moment in the future. Past research has found reminders can improve PM performance in both laboratory and naturalistic settings, but few projects have examined the circumstances when and what types of reminders are most beneficial. Three experiments in…

Chunking is the recoding of smaller units of information into larger, familiar units. Chunking is often assumed to help bypassing the limited capacity of working memory (WM). We investigate how chunks are used in WM tasks, addressing three questions: (a) Does chunking reduce the load on WM? Across four experiments chunking benefits were found not…

The current experiment examined the effect of forewarning on children's (11 to 12 years of age) and adults' spontaneous false memory creation by presenting participants with semantically related word lists that are often used to elicit false memories (i.e., Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm). The forewarning consisted of an explanation of…

Making metamemory judgments reactively changes item memory itself. Here we report the first investigation of reactive influences of making judgments of learning (JOLs) on interitem relational memory--specifically, temporal (serial) order memory. Experiment 1 found that making JOLs impaired order reconstruction. Experiment 2 observed minimal…

Communication and information sharing via social media platforms is a common and popular activity. The majority of existing studies indicate that social media usage has detrimental effects on learning and memory. However, it is an open question as to whether social media usage affects memory even after learning. To test this, healthy young adults…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the verbal short-term memory skills of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) in 2 experiments, focusing on the influence of phonological and semantic similarity. Method: Participants were 42 CWS and 42 CWNS between the ages of 3;0 and 5;11 (years;months). In Experiment…

Purpose: Acute benefits of aerobic exercise on executive functioning have been reported frequently under laboratory conditions. However, to date, a beneficial effect on long-term memory has been less well supported and no data are available regarding nonlaboratory conditions in young adults. The aim of the current study was to investigate acute…

A large variability in performance is observed when participants recall briefly presented lists of words. The sources of such variability are not known. Our analysis of a large data set of free recall revealed a small fraction of participants that reached an extremely high performance, including many trials with the recall of complete lists.…

Proactive interference (PI) refers to the finding that memory for recently studied (target) material can be impaired by the prior study of other (nontarget) material. Previous accounts of PI differed in whether they attributed PI to impaired retrieval or impaired encoding. Here, we suggest an integrated encoding-retrieval account, which assigns a…

Memory retrieval often enhances still later memory as evidenced by the testing effect. Divided attention (DA) is known to produce different effects on encoding and retrieval, substantially disrupting the former and often producing little effect on the latter. The present experiments examine whether the mnemonic consequences of retrieval are…

Initial learning can interfere with subsequent learning (proactive interference [PI]), but recent work indicates initial testing can reduce PI. Here, we tested 2 alternative hypotheses of this effect: Does testing reduce PI by constraining retrieval to the target list, or by facilitating a postretrieval monitoring process? Participants first…

Reconstructing memory for sequences is a complex process, likely involving multiple sources of information. In 3 experiments, we examined the source(s) of information that might underlie the ability to accurately place an event within a temporal context. The task was to estimate, after studying each list, the temporal position of a single test…