Involuntary episodic memories are memories of events that come to mind spontaneously, that is, with no preceding retrieval attempts. They are common in daily life and observed in a range of clinical disorders in the form of negative, intrusive recollections or flashbacks. However, little is known about their underlying mechanisms. Here we report a…

In this article, the authors present and test a formal model that holds that people use information about category boundaries in estimating inexactly represented stimuli. Boundaries restrict stimuli that are category members to fall within a particular range. This model posits that people increase the average accuracy of stimulus estimates by…

Building on 2 previous studies (B. R. Ekstrand, 1967; B. R. Ekstrand, M. J. Sullivan, D. F. Parker, & J. N. West, 1971), the authors present 2 experiments that were aimed at characterizing the role of retroactive interference in sleep-associated declarative memory consolidation. Using an A-B, A-C paradigm with lists of word pairs in Experiment 1,…

The kind of semantic information that facilitates relearning was investigated. The paradigm consisted of three stages: (1) learn a list of number-word pairs; (2) return for a retention test; and (3) relearn a new list of pairs that have various kinds of semantic relatedness to the originally learned pairs. (Author/CTM)