People constantly have to make efficient use of their limited cognitive resources. Recently, T. Mussweiler and K. Epstude (2009) demonstrated that comparative thinking simplifies information processing and increases the efficiency of judgment. However, there are different types of comparative thinking. While comparing 2 entities, people may focus…

Failure to selectively attend to a facial feature, in the part-to-whole paradigm, has been taken as evidence of holistic perception in a large body of face perception literature. In this article, we demonstrate that although failure of selective attention is a necessary property of holistic perception, its presence alone is not sufficient to…

In 2 experiments, the authors investigated a potential interaction involving the processing of concurrent feedback using design features from the specificity of practice literature and the processing of terminal feedback using a manipulation from the guidance hypothesis literature. In Experiment 1, participants produced (198 trials)…

Two accounts explain why studying pictures reduces false memories within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (J. Deese, 1959; H. L. Roediger & K. B. McDermott, 1995). The impoverished relational-encoding account suggests that studying pictures interferes with the encoding of relational information, which is the primary basis for false memories…

How do people judge which of 2 risks claims more lives per year? The authors specified 4 candidate mechanisms and tested them against people's judgments in 3 risk environments. Two mechanisms, availability by recall and regressed frequency, conformed best to people's choices. The same mechanisms also accounted well for the mapping accuracy of…

Examinations of interference between verbal and visual materials in working memory have produced mixed results. If there is a central form of storage (e.g., the focus of attention; N. Cowan, 2001), then cross-domain interference should be obtained. The authors examined this question with a visual-array comparison task (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel,…