In many circumstances in everyday life, individuals offload information to external stores (e.g., shopping lists) to compensate for limitations in internal memory. When saving information externally, individuals tend to refrain from actively encoding an additional internal copy of the information, leading to a weakening of its internal trace. This…

Color has been investigated as a signaling cue in multimedia learning environments, guiding the learner's attention and as an emotional design element, increasing the learner's motivation and, thus, improving learning outcomes. Retrieval cues (e.g., visual cues, odor, sound) facilitating memory retrieval have been primarily investigated in…

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…

Metaphor is a tool that helps us perceive the world by expressing more than word art. Metaphors are used in certain areas of education. It appears in different ways in the fields of literature, philosophy, sociology, educational sciences, social studies. Teachers also tell concrete and abstract data through metaphors to make it easier to keep in…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

This study sought to determine whether nonselective retrieval practice after study can reduce memories' susceptibility to intralist interference, as it is observed in the list-length effect, output interference, and retrieval-induced forgetting. Across 3 experiments, we compared the effects of nonselective retrieval practice and restudy on…

It can be difficult to judge the effectiveness of encoding techniques in a within-subject design. Consider the "production effect"--the finding that words read aloud are better remembered than words read silently. In the absence of a baseline, a within-subject production effect in a mixed study list could reflect a benefit of reading…

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…

By comparing the vocabularies included in the Japan Association of College English Teachers (JACET) wordlists (1993, 2003, and 2016 editions) and recently released New General Service Lists (Brezina & Gablasova, 2013; Browne, 2013), we tried to identify the construct of "the vocabulary for Japanese learners" with which JACET…

Recent research has shown that cognate word processing is modulated by variables such as degree of orthographic and phonological overlap of cognate words and task requirements in such a way that the typical preferential processing observed in the literature for cognate words relative to non-cognate words can be annulled or even reversed (Comesaña…

We examined the hypothesis that interpolated testing in a multiple list paradigm protects against proactive interference by sustaining test expectancy during encoding. In both experiments, recall on the last of 5 word lists was compared between 4 conditions: a tested group who had taken tests on all previous lists, an untested group who had not…