Perceptual fluency manipulations influence metamemory judgments, with more fluently perceived information judged as more memorable. However, it is not always clear whether this influence is driven by actual experienced processing fluency or by beliefs about memory. The current study used an identity-priming paradigm--in which words are preceded by…

The ability to judge the limits of one's own knowledge may play an important role in knowledge acquisition. The current study tested the prediction that preschoolers would judge the limits of their lexical knowledge more accurately if they were first exposed to a few objects of contrasting familiarity. Such preexposure was hypothesized to increase…

Declarative concepts (i.e., key terms and corresponding definitions for abstract concepts) represent foundational knowledge that students learn in many content domains. Thus, investigating techniques to enhance concept learning is of critical importance. Various theoretical accounts support the expectation that example generation will serve this…

Inferences of others' social traits from their faces can influence how we think and behave towards them, but little is known about how perceptions of people's traits may affect downstream cognitions, such as memory. Here we explored the relationship between targets' perceived social traits and how well they were remembered following a single brief…

Early verbal-memory researchers assumed participants represent memory of a pair of unrelated items with 2 independent, separately modifiable, directional associations. However, memory for pairs of unrelated words (A-B) exhibits associative symmetry: a near-perfect correlation between accuracy on forward (A??) and backward (??B) cued recall. This…

Combining information from the visual and auditory senses can greatly enhance intelligibility of natural speech. Integration of audiovisual speech signals is robust even when temporal offsets are present between the component signals. In the present study, we characterized the temporal integration window for speech and nonspeech stimuli with…

We present a signal detection-like model termed the stochastic detection and retrieval model (SDRM) for use in studying metacognition. Focusing on paradigms that relate retrieval (e.g., recall or recognition) and confidence judgments, the SDRM measures (1) variance in the retrieval process, (2) variance in the confidence process, (3) the extent to…

Young infants respond to positive and negative speech prosody (A. Fernald, 1993), yet 4-year-olds rely on lexical information when it conflicts with paralinguistic cues to approval or disapproval (M. Friend, 2003). This article explores this surprising phenomenon, testing one hundred eighteen 2- to 5-year-olds' use of isolated pitch cues to…

This work explores the effect of spatial cueing on number processing. Participants performed a parity judgment task. However, shortly before the target number, a cue (arrow pointing to left, arrow pointing to right or a cross) was centrally presented. In Experiment 1, in which responses were lateralized, the cue direction modulated the interaction…

According to the ease-of-processing hypothesis, judgments of learning (JOLs) rely on the ease with which items are committed to memory during encoding--that is, encoding fluency. Conclusive evidence for this hypothesis does not yet exist because encoding fluency and item difficulty have been confounded in all previous studies. To disentangle the…

The German /r/ sound is one of the most difficult sounds for American English (AE) speakers who are learning German as a foreign language to produce. The standard German /r/ variant [/R/] and dialectal variant [R] are achieved by varying the tongue constriction degree, while keeping the place of articulation constant [Schiller and Mooshammer…

Research on retrieval-induced forgetting has shown that retrieval can cause the forgetting of related or competing items in memory (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). In the present research, we examined whether an analogous phenomenon occurs in the context of creative problem solving. Using the Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962), we…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

Walking without vision results in veering, an inability to maintain a straight path that has important consequences for blind pedestrians. In this study, the authors addressed whether the source of veering in the absence of visual and auditory feedback is better attributed to errors in perceptual encoding or undetected motor error. Three…

In 3 experiments, the authors determined whether remembering a source dimension created a more complete internal reinstatement of the encoded event and thus cued access to other source dimensions. Results consistently showed that memory for the 2 source dimensions was correlated: correct responses on 1 dimension were typically associated with…