Descriptions of durational relations can be ambiguous, for example, the description "one meeting happened during another" could mean that one meeting started before the other ended, or it could mean that the meetings started and ended simultaneously. A recent theory posits that people mentally simulate descriptions of durational events…

The recognition memory receiver operating characteristic (ROC) is typically asymmetric with a characteristic elevation of the left-hand portion. Whereas the unequal variance signal detection model (uvsd) assumes the asymmetry results because old item evidence is noisier than new item evidence, the dual process signal detection model (dpsd) assumes…

When people understand a counterfactual such as "if it had been a good year, there would have been roses," they simulate the imagined alternative to reality, for example, "there were roses," and the actual reality, as known or presupposed, for example, "there were no roses." Seven experiments examined how people keep…

The increased Simon effect with increasing the ratio of congruent trials may be interpreted by both attention modulation and irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations learning accounts, although the reversed Simon effect with increasing the ratio of incongruent trials provides evidence supporting the latter account. To investigate if…

Reports on differences between remembering the past and imagining the future have led to the hypothesis that constructing future events is a more cognitively demanding process. However, factors that influence these increased demands, such as whether the event has been previously constructed and the types of details comprising the event, have…

This article reports an eye-movement experiment in which participants scanned continuous sequences of Landolt-Cs for target circles to examine the visual and oculomotor constraints that might jointly determine where the eyes move in a task that engages many of the perceptual and motor processes involved in Chinese reading but without lexical or…

Past research indicates that individuals respond adaptively to contextual factors in multiattribute choice tasks. Yet it remains unclear how this adaptation is cognitively governed. In this article, empirically testable implementations of two prominent competing theoretical frameworks are developed and compared across two multiattribute choice…

The temporal contiguity effect (TCE) is the tendency for the recall of one event to cue recall of other events originally experienced nearby in time. Retrieved context theory proposes that the TCE results from fundamental properties of episodic memory: binding of events to a drifting context representation during encoding and the reinstatement of…

Memory for verbal material improves when words form familiar chunks. But how does the improvement due to chunking come about? Two possible explanations are that the input might be actively recoded into chunks, each of which takes up less memory capacity than items not forming part of a chunk (a form of data compression), or that chunking is based…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

Categorical perception (CP) effects manifest as faster or more accurate discrimination between objects that come from different categories compared with objects that come from the same category, controlling for the physical differences between the objects. The most popular explanations of CP effects have relied on perceptual warping causing…

Past research suggests that speakers gesture more when motor simulations are more strongly activated. We investigate whether simulations of a perceptual nature also influence gesture production. Participants viewed animations of a spider moving with a manner of motion that was either highly salient (n = 29) or less salient (n = 31) and then…

We test empirically the strategic counterpart of the Adaptive Decision Maker hypothesis (Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993), which states that decision makers adapt their attention and decision rules to time pressure in predictable ways. For 29 normal form games, we test whether players adapt to tightening time constraints by reducing their…

Performance is impaired when a distracting stimulus is incongruent with the target stimulus (e.g., "green" printed in red). This congruency effect is decreased when the proportion of incongruent trials is increased, termed the proportion congruent effect. This effect is typically interpreted in terms of the adaptation of attention in…

Grounded or embodied cognition research has employed body-object interaction (BOI; e.g., Pexman et al., 2019) ratings to investigate sensorimotor effects during language processing. We investigated relationships between BOI ratings and nonarbitrary statistical mappings between words' phonological forms and their syntactic category in English;…