Semantic similarity between stimuli can lead to false memories and can also potentially cause retroactive interference (RI) for veridical memories. Here, participants first learned spatial locations for "critical" words that reliably produce false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Next, participants centrally viewed…

Chemistry is traditionally perceived as difficult to comprehend. Its mastery requires that a variety of concepts be linked to form an organized knowledge system. The connections need to be made not only between the concepts associated with the macroscopic level of the chemistry triplet but also between the submicroscopic and symbolic levels. Many…

What happens to memories as we forget? They might gradually lose fidelity, lose their associations (and thus be retrieved in response to the incorrect cues), or be completely lost. Typical long-term memory studies assess memory as a binary outcome (correct/incorrect), and cannot distinguish these different kinds of forgetting. Here we assess…

An incubation effect occurs when taking a break from a problem helps solvers arrive at the correct solution more often than working on it continuously. The forgetting-fixation account, a popular explanation of how incubation works, posits that a break from a problem allows the solver to forget the incorrect path to the solution and finally access…