We tested the limits of working-memory capacity (WMC) of young adults, old adults, and children with a memory-updating task. The task consisted of mentally shifting spatial positions within a grid according to arrows, their color signaling either only go (control) or go/no-go conditions. The interference model (IM) of Oberauer and Kliegl (2006)…

Although research has demonstrated impressive face perception skills of young infants, little attention has focused on conditions that enhance versus impair infant face perception. The present studies tested the prediction, generated from the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), that face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual…

Memory for words rated according to their relevance in a grassland survival context is exceptionally good. According to Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada's (2007) evolutionary-based explanation, natural selection processes have tuned the human memory system to prioritize the processing of fitness-relevant information. The survival-processing memory…

Participants studied category-exemplar pairs ("FRUIT Cherry," "FRUIT Grape") and then practiced some of the items ("Cherry"). In Experiment 1, practice that involved retrieving the item from memory suppressed recall of related items ("Grape"), a finding known as the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) effect.…

The semantic picture-word interference task has been used to diagnose how speakers resolve competition while selecting words for production. The attentional demands of this resolution process were assessed in 2 dual-task experiments (tone classification followed by picture naming). In Experiment 1, when pictures and distractor words were presented…

To what degree does our representation of the immediate world depend solely on its relevance to what we are currently doing? We examined whether relevance per se can cause "blindness," even when there is no resource limitation. In a novel paradigm, people looked at a colored circle surrounded by a differently colored ring--the task…

This study reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating form interference during sentence-level silent reading. The items involved reduced and unreduced relative clauses (RCs) with words that were orthographically and phonologically similar "(injection-infection"; O+P+, Experiment 1) as well as with words that were orthographically…

Participants learned foreign vocabulary by means of the paired-associates learning procedure in three conditions: (a) in silence, (b) with vocal music with lyrics in a familiar language playing in the background, or (c) with vocal music with lyrics in an unfamiliar language playing in the background. The vocabulary to learn varied in concreteness…

Many children in the U.S. initially come to understand the equal sign operationally, as a symbol meaning "add up the numbers" rather than relationally, as an indication that the two sides of an equation share a common value. According to a change-resistance account (McNeil & Alibali, 2005b), children's operational ways of thinking…

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in…

Across 3 experiments, we investigated the factors that dictate when taking a test improves subsequent memory performance (the "testing effect"). In Experiment 1, participants retrieving a set of targets during a retrieval practice phase ultimately recalled fewer of those targets compared with a group of participants who studied the…

Recognition memory accuracy is harmed by prior testing (a.k.a., output interference [OI]; Tulving & Arbuckle, 1966). In several experiments, we interpolated various tasks between recognition test trials. The stimuli and the tasks were more similar (lexical decision [LD] of words and nonwords) or less similar (gender identification of male and…

Cognitive theories on consciousness propose a strong link between consciousness and working memory (WM). This link is also present at the neural level: Both consciousness and WM have been implicated in a prefrontal parietal network. However, the link remains empirically unexplored. The present study investigates the relation between consciousness…

The sources of forgetting in working memory remain the matter of intense debate. According to the SOB model (serial order in a box; Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2002), forgetting in complex span tasks does not result from temporal decay but from interference produced by the encoding of distractors that are superimposed over memory items onto a…

Adolescent cannabis use is associated with working memory impairment. The present randomized controlled trial assigned adolescents ages 14 to 21 enrolled in cannabis use treatment to receive either working memory training (experimental group) or a control training (control group) as an adjunctive treatment. Cognitive function, drug use, and other…