The two-high-threshold (2HT) model of recognition memory assumes that people make memory errors because they fail to retrieve information from memory and make a guess, whereas the continuous unequal-variance (UV) model and the low-threshold (LT) model assume that people make memory errors because they retrieve misleading information from memory.…

Through the process of "reconsolidation," reminders can temporarily destabilize memories and render them vulnerable to change. Recent rodent research has proposed that prediction error, or the element of surprise, is a key component of this process; yet, this hypothesis has never before been extended to complex episodic memories in…

The current work uses memory errors to examine the mental representation of verb-particle constructions (VPCs; e.g., "make up" the story, "cut up the meat"). Some evidence suggests that VPCs are represented by a cline in which the relationship between the VPC and its component elements ranges from highly transparent ("cut…

Episodic memory involves flexible retrieval processes that allow us to link together distinct episodes, make novel inferences across overlapping events, and recombine elements of past experiences when imagining future events. However, the same flexible retrieval and recombination processes that underpin these adaptive functions may also leave…

Children learn information from a variety of sources and often remember the content but forget the source. Whereas the majority of research has focused on retrieval mechanisms for such difficulties, the present investigation examines whether the way in which sources are "encoded" influences future source monitoring. In Study 1, 86…

Response congruency effects in task switching reflect worse performance for incongruent targets associated with different responses across tasks than for congruent targets associated with the same response. In the present study, the author investigated whether the effects can be produced solely by a mediated route for response selection, whereby…

The study investigated mathematics cognitive failures as related to mathematics anxiety, gender and performance in calculus among 450 preservice teachers from four public universities in the South West geo-political zone of Nigeria using the quantitative research method within the blueprint of the descriptive survey design. Data collected were…

Serial position functions with marked primacy and recency effects are ubiquitous in episodic memory tasks. The demonstrations reported here explored whether bow-shaped serial position functions would be observed when people ordered exemplars from various categories along a specified dimension. The categories and dimensions were: actors and age;…

People frequently continue to use inaccurate information in their reasoning even after a credible retraction has been presented. This phenomenon is often referred to as the continued influence effect of misinformation. The repetition of the original misconception within a retraction could contribute to this phenomenon, as it could inadvertently…

Three experiments investigated whether navigation is less efficient across boundaries than within boundaries. In an immersive virtual environment, participants learned objects' locations in a large room or a small room. Participants then pointed to the objects' original locations after physically walking a circuitous path without vision.…

Four experiments were conducted to test whether conjunction errors were reduced after pictorial encoding and whether the semantic overlap between study and conjunction items would impact error rates. Across 4 experiments, compound words studied with a single-picture had lower conjunction error rates during a recognition test than those words…

Based on a 2-component framework of episodic memory development across the lifespan (Shing & Lindenberger, 2011), we examined the contribution of memory-related binding and monitoring processes to false memory susceptibility in childhood and old age. We administered a repeated continuous recognition task to children (N = 20, 10-12 years),…

Four experiments examined the roles of extended surfaces and the number of points in the boundary superiority effect in goal localization. Participants learned the locations of 4 objects in the presence of a boundary, landmarks, or both in an immersive virtual environment by reproducing the locations with feedback. Participants then localized the…

We investigated how humans encode large-scale spatial environments using a virtual taxi game. We hypothesized that if 2 connected neighborhoods are explored jointly, people will form a single integrated spatial representation of the town. However, if the neighborhoods are first learned separately and later observed to be connected, people will…

The conflict monitoring account posits that globally high levels of conflict trigger engagement of top-down control; however, recent findings point to the mercurial nature of top-down control in high conflict contexts. The current study examined the potential moderating effect of associative learning on conflict-triggered top-down control…