Foraging refers to behavior that exploits the current environment for resources and induces exploration for a better environment. Visual foraging tasks have been used to study human behavior during visual searches. Participants searched for target stimuli among the distractors and either acquired or lost points when they clicked on a target or…

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…

Learning to categorize perceptually similar stimuli can result in people becoming more sensitive to differences along perceptual dimensions that are relevant to category membership and/or less sensitive to equivalent differences along irrelevant perceptual dimensions. These effects of acquired distinctiveness and acquired equivalence may be caused…

Long-term semantic memory (LTM) is known for affecting recall during working memory (WM) tasks. However, the way LTM intervenes in WM remains unknown. Moreover, the available findings are incongruent concerning how attention modulates the impact of LTM on WM. To examine this issue, the involvement of LTM representations in a complex span task was…

Human word learning is remarkable: We not only learn thousands of words but also form organized semantic networks in which words are interconnected according to meaningful links, such as those between "apple," "juicy," and "pear." These links play key roles in our abilities to use language. How do words become…

Attempting to guess an answer to a memory question has repeatedly been shown to benefit memory for the answer compared to merely reading what the answer is, even when the guess is incorrect. In this study, we investigate 2 potential explanations for this effect in a single experimental procedure. According to the semantic explanation, the benefits…

Understanding how students learn is crucial for helping them succeed. We examined brain function in 107 undergraduate students during a task known to be challenging for many students--physics problem solving--to characterize the underlying neural mechanisms and determine how these support comprehension and proficiency. Further, we applied module…

For skill learning processes to be effective, they must encode associations that are inherent to the current task and avoid those that are spurious or particular to training conditions so that learning can transfer to novel situations. Some everyday contexts even require grouped responding to simultaneously presented stimuli. Here we test whether…

Attentional theories of associative learning and categorization propose that learning about the predictiveness of a stimulus influences the amount of attention that is paid to that stimulus. Three experiments tested this idea by looking at the extent to which stimuli that had previously been experienced as predictive or nonpredictive in a…