Being able to notice that a cause-effect relation is getting stronger or weaker is important for adapting to one's environment and deciding how to use the cause in the future. We conducted an experiment in which participants learned about a cause-effect relation that either got stronger or weaker over time. The experiment was conducted with a…

Since the Middle Ages, Augustine and the wealth of his writings have had an enormous impact on Western philosophical thinking. His approach to time and memory, which he sets out in his eleventh book of the "Confessions," is one of the most important sources for research about the philosophy of time. Augustine describes time as a…

Curiosity can be a powerful motivator to learn and retain new information. Evidence shows that high states of curiosity elicited by a specific source (i.e., a trivia question) can promote memory for incidental stimuli (non-target) presented close in time. The spreading effect of curiosity states on memory for other information has potential for…

Adults remember items with shared contexts as occurring closer in time to one another than those associated with different contexts, even when their objective temporal distance is fixed. Such temporal memory biases are thought to reflect within-event integration and between-event differentiation processes that organize events according to their…

Purpose: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex developmental condition including persistent challenges with social communication, restricted interests, and repetitive behavior. Though prospective memory failures are commonly observed in ASD population it has been less studied among adults with ASD. Prospective memory (PM) refers to the…

Contextual shifts are crucial for episodic memory, setting event boundaries during event segmentation. While lab research provides insights, it often lacks the complexity of real-world experiences. We addressed this gap by examining perceptual and conceptual boundaries using virtual reality (VR). Participants acted as salespeople, interacting with…

This essay examines Jean Améry's account of resentment as protest against oblivion and indifference and explores its implications in invoking a political pedagogy that attempts to find moral and political virtue in resentment. Exploring the pedagogical implications of resentment through the lens of Améry's account reveals something important about…

Among the "desirable difficulty" (DD) strategies developed by cognitive scientists, retrieval practice and distributed practice are two of the most robust and advantageous. This study evaluated a three-component intervention to enhance student learning that consisted of instruction about the advantages of retrieval and distributed…

Previous studies have shown that fixations on familiar stimuli tend to be longer than on unfamiliar stimuli, theorized to be a result of retrieval of information from memory. We hypothesize that extended fixations are due to a lesser need to explore an already familiar stimulus. Participant's gaze was tracked as they tried to encode or retrieve a…

We investigated the factors associated with subjective temporal distance of pandemic-related events in a sample of healthcare workers. A total of 257 healthcare workers were asked to recall two COVID-19 pandemic-related events that impacted them the most at the beginning of the pandemic (April--May 2020), and rated event centrality,…

The effects of acute stress on memory encoding are complex. Recent work has suggested that both the delay between stress and encoding and the relevance of the information learned to the stressor may modulate the effects of stress on memory encoding, but the relative contribution of each of these two factors is unclear. Therefore, in the present…

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…

Much is known about the literacies of early life, adolescence and some aspects of adulthood such as workplace literacies, but there has been a dearth of attention to the literacies of late life. The invisibility of these literacies has the potential to skew how curricula, pedagogy and policy developers understand and plan for literacies that can…

A suspect of a crime can avoid legal repercussions by creating a false alibi. We examined whether creating such a false alibi can have adverse effects on memory. To do so, participants watched a mock crime video and were either instructed to create a false alibi or to provide an honest account for what they actually saw in the video. After a 2-day…

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…