The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate…

Many researchers agree that information residing in the focus of attention in working memory benefits from a boost in memory strength and activation, as well as heightened accessibility. However, recent studies have questioned this heightened accessibility. More specifically, these recent studies found reduced accessibility for an item in the…

The current study examined why people take and delete photos with smartphone cameras, and participants' recollective experiences with saved and deleted photos. Two mixed-methods surveys asked undergraduates (Study 1) and an international online sample (Study 2) to review both recently taken and recently deleted photos from their smartphones' photo…

Why does it take less time to remember an event than to experience it? Recent evidence suggests that the dynamic unfolding of events is temporally compressed in memory representations, but the exact nature of this compression mechanism remains unclear. The present study tested two possible mechanisms. First, it could be that memories compress the…

A large-scale (n = 1323) survey of mnemonic recall, self-reported familiarity, cued explanation, and application by introductory statistics students was conducted at a large research university in the southeastern United States. The students were presented 14 mnemonics during the fall 2017 term. Different nonoverlapping cohorts of students were…

The aim of this study is to determine how students believe their learning-related experiences (i.e., attention, affect, and time perception) have changed over the course of the pandemic. This study documented students' (N[subscript analyzed] = 191) relative judgments of change between their "current" experiences (measured April 2022) and…

Narrative recall and comprehension are important lifelong skills. While gesturing may improve recall by alleviating cognitive load, it may be differentially beneficial, depending on task and individual characteristics. While research on gesture's effects on a variety of task modalities is burgeoning, effects on recall of narratives read aloud are…

We report the first evidence that the gist mechanism of fuzzy-trace theory and the associative mechanism of activation monitoring theory operate in parallel, in the recall version of the Deese/Roediger/McDermott illusion. In three experiments, we implemented a new methodology that allows their respective empirical indexes, gist strength (GS) and…

Recent years have seen an increase in the use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) technology in education and training. Studies examining the efficacy of IVR-based interventions have shown improved performance compared to traditional training programmes; however, little is known about whether such improvements can be detected at the level of…

Value-directed remembering refers to the tendency to best remember important information at the expense of less valuable information, and this ability may draw on strategic attentional processes. In six experiments, we investigated the role of attention in value-directed remembering by examining memory for important information under conditions of…

Eye-tracking methodologies have revealed that eye movements and pupil dilations are influenced by our previous experiences. Dynamic fluctuations in pupil size during learning reflect in part the formation of memories for learned information, while viewing behavior during memory testing is influenced by memory retrieval and drawn to previously…

Democracy and capitalism are two of the most consequential institutional systems in the world. However, their dynamic complexity, current turmoil, and evolution make them challenging to study. High-engagement teaching can bring the subjects alive, motivate student exploration, inform choices, animate sensible policy recommendations, and make a…

Note-taking is a commonly applied pedagogical strategy across all areas of education. In higher education specifically, there has been an increasing push to get students involved in collaborative note-taking in order to increase their engagement with the contents and to inspire deeper and more meaningful learning. However, there is a lack of…

Aim/Purpose: This article investigates the process of identifying and correcting hallucinations in ChatGPT-4's recall of student-written responses as well as its evaluation of these responses, and provision of feedback. Effective prompting is examined to enhance the pre-evaluation, evaluation, and post-evaluation stages. Background: Advanced Large…

The current study examined the effect of combining a utility value intervention with task relevance instructions on utility value, recall, and reading time. A utility value intervention is an activity that assists students in making relevance connections between course content and their lives, while task relevance instructions are pre-reading cues…