The cognitive load of many everyday life tasks exceeds known limitations of short-term memory. One strategy to compensate for information overload is cognitive offloading which refers to the externalization of cognitive processes such as reminder setting instead of memorizing. There appears to be remarkable variance in offloading behavior between…

How do we maintain information about spatial configurations in mind? Many working memory (WM) models assume that rehearsal processes are used to counteract forgetting in WM. Here, we investigated the contributions of gaze-based and attention-based rehearsal for protecting spatial representations from time-based forgetting. Participants memorized 6…

This study investigated whether text-picture integration is facilitated when text and pictures are presented simultaneously instead of sequentially. Participants memorized general and specific sentences and pictures. It was expected that due to text-picture integration, participants should falsely recognize specific versions of the sentences and…

Recent empirical and theoretical work suggests that visual features such as color and orientation can be stored or retrieved independently in visual working memory (VWM), even in cases when they belong to the same object. Yet it remains unclear whether different feature dimensions have their own capacity limits, or whether they compete for shared…

Motor affordances have been shown to play a role in visual object identification and categorization. The present study explored whether working memory is likewise supported by motor affordances. Use of motor affordances should be disrupted by motor interference, and this effect should be larger for objects that have motor affordances than for…

Previous studies suggested that primary somatosensory (SI) neurons in well-trained monkeys participated in the haptic-haptic unimodal delayed matching-to-sample (DMS) task. In this study, 585 SI neurons were recorded in monkeys performing a task that was identical to that in the previous studies but without requiring discrimination and active…

The present study examined the role of controlled attention in age differences in event-based prospective memory performance across adolescence. The researchers tested whether presenting the prospective memory cue in or out of focal awareness of the ongoing task (resulting in low versus high demands for controlled attention, respectively) might…

The influence of semantic processing on the serial ordering of items in short-term memory was explored using a novel dual-task paradigm. Participants engaged in 2 picture-judgment tasks while simultaneously performing delayed serial recall. List material varied in the presence of phonological overlap (Experiments 1 and 2) and in semantic content…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated sentence comprehension and spatial working memory abilities in a sample of internationally adopted, postinstitutionalized (PI) children. The authors compared the performance of these PI children with that of an age-matched group of children living with their birth families. They hypothesized that PI…

Previous studies have indicated that visual working memory performance increases with age in childhood, but it is not clear why. One main hypothesis has been that younger children are less efficient in their attention; specifically, they are less able to exclude irrelevant items from working memory to make room for relevant items. We examined this…

Background: We conducted a comprehensive and systematic assessment of memory functioning in drug-naive boys with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Methods: Boys performed verbal and spatial working memory (WM) component (storage and central executive) and verbal and spatial storage load tasks,…

Little is known about how components of executive function (EF) jointly and uniquely predict different aspects of academic achievement and how this may vary across cultural contexts. In the current study, 119 Chinese and 139 American preschoolers were tested on a battery of EF tasks (i.e., inhibition, working memory, and attentional control) as…

Artificial grammar learning constitutes a well-established model for the acquisition of grammatical knowledge in a natural setting. Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that Broca's area (left BA 44/45) is similarly activated by natural syntactic processing and artificial grammar learning. The current study was conducted to investigate the…

Background: Progressive myelination during adolescence implicates an increased vulnerability to neurotoxic substances and enduring neurocognitive consequences. This study examined the cognitive manifestations of altered white matter microstructure in chronic marijuana and alcohol-using (MJ + ALC) adolescents. Methods: Thirty-six MJ + ALC…

Although much literature suggests that the age-related decline in episodic memory could be due to difficulties in binding features of information, previous studies focused mainly on memory of paired associations rather than memory of multiple bound features. In reality, however, there are many situations that require binding multiple features…