Item memory (e.g., recall or recognition of specific items) can reactively change when metacognitively monitored via judgments of learning (JOLs). The current research explores whether memory for inter-item relations (e.g., semantic relations among list items) is reactively influenced by JOLs. Participants in Experiment 1 studied rhyming word…

Applying 10 Hz ([alpha]-rate) sensory stimulation, not 5 Hz ([theta]-rate), prior to introducing novel speech-print pairs can reset the phase of [theta] oscillations and enhance associative learning. This rapid gain indicates coordinated mechanisms to regulate attentional/cognitive resources ([alpha] oscillations) and facilitate memory storage…

Research has shown that judgments of learning (JOLs) often produce a reactive effect on the learning of cue-target pairs in which target recall differs between participants who provide item-based JOLs at study versus those who do not. Positive reactivity, or the memory improvement found when JOLs are provided, is typically observed on related…

We report three item-method directed forgetting (DF) studies to evaluate whether DF impairs primarily item memory, or whether it also impairs associative memory. The current studies used a modified associative recognition paradigm that allowed disentangling item impairment from associative impairment in DF. Participants studied scene-object…

Stimuli presented with targets during a monitoring task are better remembered than stimuli presented with distractors, a result referred to as the attentional boost effect (ABE). The ABE is consistently found for item memory, but conflicting results have been reported for different assessments of associative memory, with studies of source memory…

The process of creative problem-solving (CPS) commonly demands that individuals consciously or unconsciously integrate creative ideas from a vast array of diverse information. Using a masked priming paradigm and the Chinese remote associates test (RAT), this study provides innovative behavioral evidence for the integration of multiple unconscious…

Childhood is a period when memory consolidation and knowledge base undergo rapid changes. The present study examined short-delay (overnight) and long-delay (after a 2-week period) consolidation of new information either congruent or incongruent with prior knowledge in typically developing 6- to 8-year-old children (n = 32), 9- to 11-year-old…

Key areas of the episodic memory (EM) network demonstrate changing structure and volume during adolescence. EM is multifaceted and yet studies of EM thus far have largely examined single components, used different methods and have unsurprisingly yielded inconsistent results. The Treasure Hunt task is a single paradigm that allows parallel…

Previous studies on value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) have demonstrated that the uncertainty of reward value modulates attentional allocation via associative learning. However, it is unclear whether such attentional exploration is executed based on the amount of potential reward information available for refining value prediction or the…

When young children evaluate their confidence, their monitoring is often overoptimistic, that is, inaccurate. The present study investigated a potential underlying mechanism for kindergarteners' and second graders' overconfidence within a paired associates learning paradigm. We implemented a pre-monitoring phase motivating children to…

Associating names to faces can be challenging, in part because this task lacks an inherent semantic relationship between a face and name. The current study seeks to understand whether bolstering names with cross-modal cues--specifically, name tags--may aid memory for face and name pairings. In a series of five experiments, we investigated whether…

In many domains, learners extract recurring units from continuous sequences. For example, in unknown languages, fluent speech is perceived as a continuous signal. Learners need to extract the underlying words from this continuous signal and then memorize them. One prominent candidate mechanism is statistical learning, whereby learners track how…

Visual imagery and mental reconstruction of scenes are considered core components of episodic memory retrieval. Individuals with absent visual imagery (aphantasia) score lower on tests of autobiographical memory, suggesting that aphantasia may be associated with differences in episodic and associative processing. In this online study, we tested…

Judgments of learning (JOL) are often used to assess memory monitoring at encoding. Participants study a cue-target word pair (e.g., mouse-cheese) and are asked to rate the probability of correctly recalling the target in the presence of the cue at test (e.g., mouse -?). Prior research has shown that JOL accuracy is sensitive to perceptual cues.…

The present study evaluates the updating of long-term memory for duration. After learning a temporal discrimination associating one lever with a standard duration (4 sec) and another lever with both a shorter (1-sec) and a longer (16-sec) duration, rats underwent a single session for learning a new standard duration. The temporal generalization…