In uncertain environments we must balance our need to gather information with our desire to reap rewards by exploiting current knowledge. Achieving this balance is further complicated in reactive environments where actions produce long-lasting change to the system. In four experiments, we investigate how people learn to make effective decisions…

Prior research has investigated whether learners spontaneously adapt their encoding strategies in anticipation of particular test formats (i.e., the "encoding-strategy adaptation hypothesis"; Finley & Benjamin, 2012). However, the strongest evidence supporting this hypothesis is confounded with test experience (as argued by Cho &…

The majority of the literature on the psychology of gains and losses suggests that losses lead to an avoidance response. Several studies, however, have shown that losses can also lead to an approach response, whereby an option is selected more often when it produces losses. In five studies we examine the boundary conditions for these contradictory…

In everyday life, people encounter smaller rewards with higher probability than larger rewards. Do people expect this reward--probability regularity to hold in experimental settings? To answer this question, we tested whether people's behavior in probability judgment tasks is affected by the correlation between reward size and reward…

Research has shown that adults' lexical-semantic representations are surprisingly malleable. For instance, the interpretation of ambiguous words (e.g., bark) is influenced by experience such that recently encountered meanings become more readily available (Rodd et al., 2016, 2013). However, the mechanism underlying this word-meaning priming effect…

In classic category learning studies, subjects typically learn to assign items to 1 of 2 categories, with no further distinction between how items on each side of the category boundary should be treated. In real life, however, we often learn categories that dictate further processing goals, for instance, with objects in only 1 category requiring…

Eye movement measures demonstrate differences in first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) paragraph-level reading as a function of individual differences in current L2 exposure among bilinguals (Whitford & Titone, 2012). Specifically, as current L2 exposure increases, the ease of L2 word processing increases, but the ease of L1 word…

We assessed the extent to which previous experience of joint gaze with people (i.e., looking toward the same object) modulates later gaze cueing of attention elicited by those individuals. Participants in Experiments 1 and 2a/b first completed a saccade/antisaccade task while a to-be-ignored face either looked at, or away from, the participants'…

Recently, a great deal of research has demonstrated that although everyday experience is continuous in nature, it is parsed into separate events. The aim of the present study was to examine whether event structure can influence the effectiveness of cognitive control. Across 5 experiments we varied the structure of events within the AX-CPT by…

Classic theories emphasized the role of expectations in the intentional control of attention and action. However, recent theorizing has implicated experience-dependent, online adjustments as the primary basis for cognitive control--adjustments that appear to be implicit (Blais, Harris, Guerrero, & Bunge, 2012). The purpose of the current study…

Recent research investigating decisions from experience suggests that not all information is treated equally in the decision process, with more recently encountered information having a greater impact. We report 2 studies investigating how this differential treatment of sequentially encountered information affects subjective valuations of risky…

No one would argue with the proposition that how we process events in the world is strongly affected by our experience. Nonetheless, recent experience (e.g., from the previous trial) is typically not considered in the analysis of timed cognitive performance in the laboratory. Masson and Kliegl (2013) reported that, in the context of the lexical…

Numbers and space are tightly linked--a phenomenon that is referred to as the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993). The present study investigates how quickly and flexibly the behavioral impact of such spatial-numerical associations can be controlled. Participants performed a parity…

Mind wandering--mentation unrelated to one's current activity and surroundings--is a ubiquitous phenomenon, but seemingly competing ideas have been proposed regarding its relation to executive cognitive processes. The control-failure hypothesis postulates that executive processes prevent mind wandering, whereas the global availability hypothesis…

Individual differences in mind wandering and reading comprehension were examined in the current study. In particular, individual differences in mind wandering, working memory capacity, interest in the current topic, motivation to do well on the task, and topic experience and their relations with reading comprehension were examined in the current…