The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of test trial and processing level on immediate and delayed retention. A 2 × 2 × 2 mixed ANOVAs was used with two between-subject factors of test trial (single test, repeated test) and processing level (shallow, deep), and one within-subject factor of final recall (immediate,…

Recent research has shown that cognate word processing is modulated by variables such as degree of orthographic and phonological overlap of cognate words and task requirements in such a way that the typical preferential processing observed in the literature for cognate words relative to non-cognate words can be annulled or even reversed (Comesaña…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of test trial and processing level on immediate and delayed retention. Seventy-six college students were randomly assigned first to the single test and the repeated test trials, and then to the shallow processing level and the deep processing level to study forty stimulus words.…

The "word frequency paradox" refers to the finding that low frequency words are better recognized than high frequency words yet high frequency words are better recalled than low frequency words. Rather than comparing separate groups of low and high frequency words, we sought to quantify the functional relation between word frequency and…

Study stimuli presented at the same time as unrelated targets in a detection task are better remembered than stimuli presented with distractors. This attentional boost effect (ABE) has been found with pictorial (Swallow & Jiang, 2010) and more recently verbal materials (Spataro, Mulligan, & Rossi-Arnaud, 2013). The present experiments…

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…

Decision-makers effortlessly balance the need for urgency against the need for caution. Theoretical and neurophysiological accounts have explained this tradeoff solely in terms of the "quantity" of evidence required to trigger a decision (the "threshold"). This explanation has also been used as a benchmark test for evaluating…

The effects of properties of words on their reading aloud response times (RTs) are 1 major source of evidence about the reading process. The precision with which such RTs could potentially be predicted by word properties is critical to evaluate our understanding of reading but is often underestimated due to contamination from individual…

Whereas some research on immediate recall of verbal lists has suggested that it is limited by the number of chunks that can be recalled (e.g., N. Cowan, Z. Chen, & J. N. Rouder, 2004; E. Tulving & J. E. Patkau, 1962), other research has suggested that it is limited by the length of the material to be recalled (e.g., A. D. Baddeley, N. Thomson, &…

Two criteria for the automatic encoding of learning, instructional manipulation, and stimulus characteristics were studied in subjects who judged the frequency of occurrence of words, letters, and nonwords. In Experiment 1, six word lists were constructed with varying frequency of alphabet letters. A variety of instructions were presented (whether…