The purpose of this study was to clarify the relationship between attention, components of working memory, and reasoning. Therefore, twenty working memory tests, two attention tests, and nine intelligence subtests were administered to 135 students. Using structural equation modeling, we were able to replicate a functional model of working memory…

In 3 experiments, the authors studied the organization of spatiotemporal information in memory. Stimuli consisted of configurations of dots, presented sequentially. The stimuli were either proportional, with interdot distances corresponding to interdot durations, or not proportional, with interdol distances not corresponding to interdot durations.…

Pictures seen in a rapid sequence are remembered briefly, but most are forgotten within a few seconds (M. C. Potter. A. Staub, J. Rado. & D. H. O'Connor. 2002). The authors investigated the pictorial and conceptual components of this fleeting memory by presenting 5 pictured scenes and immediately testing recognition of verbal titles (e.g., people…

The authors tested the hypothesis that with adequate practice, people can execute 2 cognitive operations in working memory simultaneously. In Experiment 1, 6 students practiced updating 2 items in working memory through 2 sequences of operations (1 numerical, 1 spatial). In different blocks, imperative stimuli for the 2 sequences of operations…

This article provides evidence for implicit change detection and for the contribution of multiple memory sources to online representations. Multiple eye-movement measures distinguished original from changed scenes, even when college students had no conscious awareness for the change. Patients with amnesia showed a systematic deficit on 1 class of…

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated spatial updating in a familiar environment. Participants learned locations of objects in a room, walked to the center, and turned to appropriate facing directions before making judgments of relative direction (e.g., "Imagine you are standing at X and facing Y. Point to Z.") or egocentric pointing…

The authors examined how situation models are updated during text comprehension. If comprehenders keep track of the evolving situation, they should update their models such that the most current information, the here and now, is more available than outdated information. Contrary to this updating hypothesis, E. J. O'Brien, M. L. Rizzella, J. E.…

Provides the biography of Richard M. Shiffrin and announces that he has received the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions (2004) for his brilliant development of formal models of memory and forgetting; for his ingenious empirical investigations into the nature of memory and attention; and for his unified accounts of attention and…

The compensatory-encoding model (CEM) postulates that readers whose decoding of words or verbal working memory capacities is inefficient can compensate so that literal comprehension of text is not deleteriously affected. However, the use of compensations may draw cognitive resources away from higher level reading activities such as comprehension…

Perceiving other people's behaviors activates imitative motor plans in the perceiver, but there is disagreement as to the function of this activation. In contrast to other recent proposals (e.g., that it subserves overt imitation, identification and understanding of actions, or working memory), here it is argued that imitative motor activation…

Thirteen high intelligent (H-IQ) and 13 low intelligent (L-IQ) individuals solved two figural working-memory (WM) tasks and two figural learning tasks while their EEG was recorded. For the WM tasks, only in the theta band group related differences in induced event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS) were observed. L-IQ individuals…

Participants are more likely to give positive responses on a recognition test to pseudowords (pronounceable nonwords) than words. A series of experiments suggests that this difference reflects the greater overall familiarity of pseudowords than of words. Pseudowords receive higher ratings of similarity to a studied list than do words. Pseudowords…

This study examines the potential encoding in long-term memory of subphonemic, within-category variation in voice onset time (VOT) and the degree to which this encoding of subtle variation is mediated by lexical competition. In 4 long-term repetition-priming experiments, magnitude of priming was examined as a function of variation in VOT in words…

We studied the capability of the cricket "Gryllus bimaculatus" to select one of a pair of odors and to avoid the other in one context and to do the opposite in another context. One group of crickets was trained to associate one of a pair of odors (conditioned stimulus, CS1) with water reward (appetitive unconditioned stimulus, US+) and another…

These experiments investigated the role of the noradrenergic system in the late stage of memory consolidation and in particular its action at beta receptors in the prelimbic region (PL) of the prefrontal cortex in the hours after training. Rats were trained in a rapidly acquired, appetitively motivated foraging task based on olfactory…