In learning contexts, people need to make realistic confidence judgments about their memory performance. The present study investigated whether second-order judgments of first-order confidence judgments could help people improve their confidence judgments of semantic memory information. Furthermore, we assessed whether different personality and…

Many studies suggest that long-term lexical-semantic knowledge is an important determinant of verbal short-term memory (STM) performance. This study explored the impact of emotional valence on word immediate serial recall as a further lexico-semantic long-term memory (LTM) effect on STM. This effect is particularly interesting for the study of…

Unsworth and Engle (2007) recently proposed a model of working memory capacity characterized by, among other things, the ability to conduct a strategic, cue-dependent search of long-term memory. Although this ability has been found to mediate individual variation in a number of higher order cognitive tasks, the component processes involved remain…

Background: Recent studies have demonstrated that individuals with Down syndrome (DS) are poorer than controls in spatial-simultaneous tasks, but not in spatial-sequential tasks. To explain this finding, it has been suggested that the simultaneous visuo-spatial working memory deficit of individuals with DS could be due to the request for…

Carrier and Pashler (1995) concluded--based on locus-of-slack dual-task methodology--that memory retrieval was subject to a central bottleneck. However, this conclusion conflicts with evidence from other lines of research suggesting that memory retrieval proceeds autonomously, in parallel with many other mental processes. In the present…

Recalling an experience often impairs the later retention of related traces, a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). Research has shown that episodic associations protect competing memories from RIF (Anderson & McCulloch, 1999). We report 4 experiments that examined whether semantic associations also protect against RIF. In…

In most of the long history of the study of absolute identification--since Miller's (1956) seminal article--a severe limit on performance has been observed, and this limit has resisted improvement even by extensive practice. In a startling result, Rouder, Morey, Cowan, and Pfaltz (2004) found substantially improved performance with practice in the…

The American Psychological Foundation (APF) Gold Medal Awards recognize distinguished and enduring records of accomplishment in four areas of psychology: the application of psychology, the practice of psychology, psychology in the public interest, and the science of psychology. The 2011 recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the…

The two members of the Staufen family of RNA-binding proteins, Stau1 and Stau2, are present in distinct ribonucleoprotein complexes and associate with different mRNAs. Stau1 is required for protein synthesis-dependent long-term potentiation (L-LTP) in hippocampal pyramidal cells. However, the role of Stau2 in synaptic plasticity remains…

Two experiments examined the hypothesis that developing visual attentional mechanisms influence infants' Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM) in the context of multiple items. Five- and 10-month-old infants (N = 76) received a change detection task in which arrays of three differently colored squares appeared and disappeared. On each trial one square…

This study examined the relationship between endogenous hormones and cognitive function in nondemented, ethnically-diverse community-dwelling older men enrolled in the Einstein Aging Study (EAS). All eligible participants (185 men, mean age = 81 years) received neuropsychological assessment (Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test (FCSRT), Logical…

The efficiency of prospective memory (PM) typically increases from childhood to young adulthood and then decreases in later adulthood. The current study used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine the development of the neural correlates of processes associated with the detection of a PM cue, switching from the ongoing activity to the…

Working memory is the limited capacity storage system involved in the maintenance and manipulation of information over short periods of time. Previous imaging studies have suggested that the frontoparietal regions are activated during working memory tasks; a putative association between the structure of the frontoparietal regions and working…

Eighty 4- to 9-year-old children answered factual knowledge questions in math, science and social studies during one-on-one interviews. Children indicated whether they had known or guessed each answer, and whether they (a) remembered the moment they learned the answer (episodic response) or (b) did not remember. For episodic responses, children…

The effects of embedding standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists into stories whose context biased interpretation either toward or away from the overall themes of the DRM lists on both true and false recognition were investigated with 7- and 11-year-olds. These biased story contexts were compared with the same children's susceptibility to…