Memory retrieval affects subsequent memory in ways both positive (e.g., the testing effect) and negative (e.g., retrieval-induced forgetting, RIF). The changes to memory that retrieval produces can be thought of as the encoding consequences of retrieval, examined here with respect to attention. In three experiments, participants first studied…

Proactive interference (PI) occurs when previously learned memories compete with currently relevant information. Despite extensive literature investigating the effect in adults, little work has been done in young children. In three preregistered studies (N = 38, 35, 172; convenience samples from the Northeastern United States), first, we showed…

This study traced different types of distractor effects in the picture-word interference (PWI) task across repeated naming. Starting point was a PWI study by Kurtz et al. (2018). It reported that naming a picture (e.g., of a duck) was slowed down by a distractor word phonologically related to an alternative picture name from a different taxonomic…

Introduction: Understanding the mechanism through which test anxiety affects students' learning outcomes is critical to its management. Test preparation strategies are associated with test confidence and might also affect students' academic performance. However, previous studies have downplayed the role that students' test preparation strategies…

Background: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs), or experiments, are the gold standard for intervention evaluation. However, the main appeal of RCTs--the clean identification of causal effects--can be compromised by interference, when one subject's actions can influence another subject's behavior or outcomes. In this paper, we formalize and study…

We investigated whether increased perceptual processing difficulty during reading or listening to a Sherlock Holmes novella impacts mind wandering as well as text comprehension. We presented 175 participants with a novella in either a visual or an auditory presentation format and probed their thoughts and motivational states from time to time…

Stimuli presented with targets during a monitoring task are better remembered than stimuli presented with distractors, a result referred to as the attentional boost effect (ABE). The ABE is consistently found for item memory, but conflicting results have been reported for different assessments of associative memory, with studies of source memory…

Attention, the mechanism that prioritizes stimuli in the environment for further processing, plays an important role in behavioral choice. In the present study, we investigated the automatic orienting of attention to cues that signal reward. Such attentional capture occurs despite negative consequences, and we investigated whether this…

Different types of reasoning, such as intuitive, inductive, and deductive, are used in the generalization of figural patterns, as an important part of patterns in school mathematics. It is difficult to demarcate the constructive patterns where the regularity observed in the first few sentences is generalizable to the other sentences and each…

Students' difficulties in differentiating the direct proportion and inverse proportion problems cause interference. Proactive interference is the error that occurs when old information (concept of direct proportion) interferes with new information (concept of inverse proportion). In solving the problem of inverse proportion, students often use the…

Background: Previous studies have shown that dynamic illustrations, as compared to their static counterparts, lead to higher achievement levels, especially for hand-based procedures. Other researchers have investigated how the presence of seductive details (i.e., appealing but irrelevant adjunct displays) influences students' interest positively…

Distinguishing easily confusable categories requires learners to detect their predictive differences. Interleaved sequences -- switching between categories -- help learners to detect such differences. Nonetheless, learners prefer to block -- switching within a category -- to detect commonalities. Across two 2 × 2-factorial experiments, we…

When a highly salient distractor is present in a search array, it speeds target absent visual search and increases errors during target present visual search, suggesting lowered quitting thresholds (Moher in Psychol Sci 31(1):31-42, 2020). Missing a critical target in the presence of a highly salient distractor can have dire consequences in…

In the present study, we examined how the relevance of potentially distracting information modulates the interplay of target and distractor processing in conflict tasks. Specifically, we manipulated the degree to which distracting information is relevant for performing the overall task by varying the proportion of trials in which a response to the…

Purpose: This study investigated conflict adaptation in aphasia, specifically whether upregulating cognitive control improves sentence comprehension. Method: Four individuals with mild aphasia completed four eye tracking sessions with interleaved auditory Stroop and sentence-to-picture matching trials (critical and filler sentences). Auditory…