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…

We examined whether the position of modifiers in English influences how words are encoded and subsequently retrieved from memory. Compared with premodifiers, postmodifiers might confer more perceptual significance to the associated head nouns, are more consistent with the "given-before-new" information structure, and might also be easier…

Teachers and trainers often try to prevent learners from making errors, but recent findings (e.g., Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009) have demonstrated that tests can potentiate subsequent learning even when the correct answer is difficult or impossible to generate (e.g., "What is Nate Kornell's middle name?"). In 3 experiments, we…