This study reports the results of 4 experiments that addressed whether the domains of deictic time and number exert a cross-domain link. Such a link would be consistent with A Theory of Magnitude (i.e., ATOM). In contrast, no link between the two domains would support the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), which assumes that each domain is only…

While visual working memory has a short lifetime, residual representations can persist and disrupt currently maintained information. This phenomenon is known as proactive interference (PI), and the present study investigated whether the representations underpinning item-specific PI lose details over time. This would be expected if the memories…

Natural environments provide a rich spatiotemporal context that allows for visual objects to be differentiated based on different types of information: their absolute or relative spatial or temporal coordinates, or their ordinal positions in a spatial or temporal sequence. Here, we investigated which spatial and temporal properties are…

Although working memory (WM) is usually defined as a cognitive system coordinating processing and storage in the short term, in most WM models, memory aspects have been developed more fully than processing systems, and many studies of WM tasks have tended to focus on memory performance. The present study investigated WM functioning without…

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…

The basic timescales governing animal life are generally determined by body size. Pauses in naturally occurring human speech were investigated to determine if pause timescales are also sensitive to body size. Reported is an analysis of pause duration allometry in recorded interviews of 61 athletes. Pauses were divided into three classes based on…

Perception is driven not only by current stimulation but also by previous sensory experience, which may serve as a perceptual prior for stimulus processing. A possible mechanism underlying this phenomenon is formalized in the internal reference model, which assumes that humans rely on an internal reference that updates continuously by integrating…

Events and activities consist not only of sequences of individual actions, but also they form hierarchies comprising chains of low-level actions grouped together to form higher level activities. Therefore, observers face the task of not only segmenting a continuous event stream into discrete units, but also processing these units on an appropriate…

Integrating evidence from multiple sources to guide decisions is something humans do on a daily basis. Existing research suggests that not all sources of information are weighted equally in decision-making tasks, and that observers are subject to biases in the face of internal and external noise. Here we describe two experiments that measured…

The attentional boost effect refers to the observation that when simultaneously performing a scene memory task and a target detection task, participants better remember scenes that appear at the same time as the detection target than scenes that coincide with distractors. The attentional boost effect is thought to result from a transient increase…

Over the last 50 years, cue competition phenomena have shaped theoretical developments in animal and human learning. However, recent failures to observe competition effects in standard conditioning procedures, as well as the lengthy and ongoing debate surrounding cue competition in the spatial learning literature, have cast doubts on the…

In absolute identification, the extended generalized context model (EGCM; Kent & Lamberts, 2005, 2016) proposes that perceptual processing determines systematic response time (RT) variability; all other models of RT emphasize response selection processes. In the EGCM-RT the bow effect in RTs (longer responses for stimuli in the middle of the…

The processing of time activates a spatial left-to-right mental timeline, where past events are "located" to the left and future events to the right. If past and future words activate this mental timeline, then the processing of such words should interfere with hand movements that go in the opposite direction. To test this hypothesis, we…

The ability to think about nonpresent time is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Both the past and future imply a temporal displacement of an event outside the "now." They also intrinsically differ: The past refers to inalterable events; the future to alterable events, to possible worlds. Are the past and future processed similarly or…

Eight experiments (N = 2,003) assessed the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and performance on the antisaccade task. Experiments 1-5 and 7 examined individual differences in aspects of goal management processes occurring during the preparatory delay of the antisaccade task. WMC tended to interact with delay interval suggesting that…