The basic timescales governing animal life are generally determined by body size. Pauses in naturally occurring human speech were investigated to determine if pause timescales are also sensitive to body size. Reported is an analysis of pause duration allometry in recorded interviews of 61 athletes. Pauses were divided into three classes based on…

While visual working memory has a short lifetime, residual representations can persist and disrupt currently maintained information. This phenomenon is known as proactive interference (PI), and the present study investigated whether the representations underpinning item-specific PI lose details over time. This would be expected if the memories…

Slamecka and McElree (1983) and Rivera-Lares et al. (2022), like others before them, factorially manipulated the number of learning trials and the retention interval. The results revealed two unsurprising main effects: (a) the more study trials, the higher the initial degree of learning, and (b) the longer the retention interval, the more items…

Cognitive control theories describe the active maintenance of goal representations over temporal delays as central for adaptive behavior. Dynamic adaptations of goal representations are often measured as the congruency sequence effect (CSE), which describes a reduced congruency effect in trials following incongruent trials compared to congruent…

In schema-based source monitoring, people mistakenly predict better source memory for expected sources (e.g., oven in the kitchen; "expectancy effect"), whereas actual source memory is better for unexpected sources (e.g., hairdryer in the kitchen; "inconsistency effect"; Schaper et al., 2019b). In three source-monitoring…

Research suggests that forcing participants to withhold responding for as brief as 600 ms eliminates one of the most reliable findings in prospective memory (PM): the cue focality effect. This result undermines the conventional view that controlled attentional monitoring processes support PM, and instead suggests that cue detection results from…

Research on prospective memory has paid no attention to the way in which the intentions to be remembered are framed. In two studies on time-based prospective memory, participants had to remember multiple delayed intentions framed as time rules (i.e., respond every 7 min, every 10 min) or as a series of corresponding instances (i.e., respond at…

Soliciting predictions about hypothetical memory performance (without having participants engage in a related memory task) is a simple way for researchers to examine people's metacognitive beliefs about how memory functions. Using this methodology, researchers can vary what information is provided as part of the scenario or how the memory…

Eight experiments (N = 2,003) assessed the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and performance on the antisaccade task. Experiments 1-5 and 7 examined individual differences in aspects of goal management processes occurring during the preparatory delay of the antisaccade task. WMC tended to interact with delay interval suggesting that…

A cognitive-energetic account of individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) and sustained attention performance is proposed suggesting that variation in the voluntary control of the intensity of attention (intrinsic alertness) is critical for the relation between WMC and attention control. Four experiments examining individual…

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.…

How do we assess what we remember? Previous work on metacognition suggests that confidence judgments are more accurate when given after than before a response to a perceptual task. Here we present two experiments that investigate the influence of decision and response on metacognitive accuracy in a memory task so as to establish what kind of…

Numerous studies of retrieval-induced forgetting have shown that the selective retrieval of some studied items can impair recall of other nonretrieved items. Varying the lag between study and selective retrieval and using lists of unrelated items as study material, recent work replicated this detrimental effect when the lag between study and…

During conversation, interlocutors often produce their utterances with little overlap or gap between their turns. But what mechanism underlies this striking ability to time articulation appropriately? In 2 verbal "yes/no" question-answering experiments, we investigated whether listeners use the speech rate of questions to time…

Retrieval practice relative to restudy of learned material typically attenuates time-dependent forgetting. A recent study examining this testing effect across 12-h delays filled with nocturnal sleep versus daytime wakefulness, however, showed that sleep directly following encoding benefited recall of restudied but not of retrieval practiced items,…