Two experiments were conducted (a) to evaluate how providing background information at test may benefit retrieval and (b) to further examine how providing background information prior to study influences encoding. Half of the participants read background information prior to study, and the other half did not. In each group, half were presented…

This article offers a reformulation of the negative reinforcement model of drug addiction and proposes that the escape and avoidance of negative affect is the prepotent motive for addictive drug use. The authors posit that negative affect is the motivational core of the withdrawal syndrome and argue that, through repeated cycles of drug use and…

Background: In adults there is evidence that the affective-cognitive processes of rumination and overgeneral autobiographical memory retrieval may play a part in maintaining depression. This study investigated the effects of induced rumination as compared to distraction on mood and categoric overgeneral memory in adolescents with first episode…

Autism is a lifelong developmental disorder that is associated with severe difficulties with ''theory-of-mind''--the understanding that others' behaviors are motivated by internal mental states. Here, we raise the possibility that research examining the neural bases of theory-of-mind reasoning has the potential to inform researchers about the…

The purpose of the present study was to replicate and extend to word recognition previous findings of reduced magnitude and reliability of laterality effects when exogenous cueing was used in a dichotic listening task with syllable pairs. Twenty right-handed undergraduate students with normal hearing (10 females, 10 males) completed a dichotic…

For the past several years it has been thought that cues, such as eye direction, can trigger reflexive shifts in attention because of their biological relevance and their specialized neural architecture. However, very recently, Ristic, Friesen, and Kingstone (2002) reported that other stimuli, such as arrows, trigger reflexive shifts in attention…

The problem of recognizing phonological variations in the speech input has triggered numerous treatments in speech processing models. Two areas of current controversy are the possibility of phonological underspecification in the mental lexicon and the nature of the mapping mechanism from the speech signal to the abstract lexical entry. We present…

This paper studies the dynamics of attempting to access two spatial memories simultaneously and its implications for the accuracy of recall. Experiment 1 demonstrates in a range of conditions that two cues pointing to different experiences of the same object location produce little or no higher recall than that observed with a single cue.…

Previous research has shown that judgments of learning (JOLs) made immediately after encoding have a low correlation with actual cued-recall performance, whereas the correlation is high for delayed judgments. In this article, the authors propose a formal theory describing the stochastic drift of memory strength over the retention interval to…

Six experiments examined the proposal that an item of long-term knowledge can be simultaneously inhibited and activated. In 2 directed forgetting experiments items to-be-forgotten were found to be inhibited in list-cued recall but activated in lexical decision tasks. In 3 retrieval practice experiments, unpracticed items from practiced categories…

In 3 experiments the authors investigate how errors in perception produce errors in drawings. In Experiment 1, when Shepard stimuli were shown as a pair of tables, participants made severe errors in trying to adjust 1 part of the stimulus to match the other. When the table legs were removed, revealing a pair of parallelograms with minimal…

Children ages 2, 3 and 4 years participated in a novel hide-and-seek search task presented on a touchscreen monitor. On beacon trials, the target hiding place could be located using a beacon cue, but on landmark trials, searching required the use of a nearby landmark cue. In Experiment 1, 2-year-olds performed less accurately than older children…

The present work introduces a form of associative mechanosensory conditioning of the proboscis extension reflex (PER) in honeybees. In our paradigm, harnessed honeybees learn the elemental association between mechanosensory, antennal stimulation and a reward of sucrose solution delivered to the proboscis. Thereafter, bees extend their proboscis to…

An important source of information about a new word's meaning (and its associated lexical class) is its range of reference: the number of objects to which it is extended. Ninety toddlers (mean age = 37 months) participated in a study to determine whether young children can use this information in word learning. When a novel word was presented with…

Lexical prosody (e.g., stress and pitch accent) has been shown to constrain lexical activation of spoken words in various languages. In the present study, whether or not the constraint of lexical prosody is affected by word familiarity in lexical access of Japanese words was examined using a cross-modal priming task. The stimuli were pairs of…