Evidence is mixed concerning whether delayed judgments of learning (JOLs) enhance learning and if so, whether their benefit is similar to retrieval practice. One potential explanation for the mixed findings is the truncated search hypothesis, which states that not all delayed JOLs lead to a full-blown covert retrieval attempt. In three…

Considerable work during the past two decades has focused on modeling the structure of semantic memory, although the performance of these models in complex and unconstrained semantic tasks remains relatively understudied. We introduce a two-player cooperative word game, Connector (based on the boardgame Codenames), and investigate whether…

Early verbal-memory researchers assumed participants represent memory of a pair of unrelated items with 2 independent, separately modifiable, directional associations. However, memory for pairs of unrelated words (A-B) exhibits associative symmetry: a near-perfect correlation between accuracy on forward (A??) and backward (??B) cued recall. This…

Children and adults learned associations between line length and color. Subjects were then presented with pairs of colors and asked to choose the color that had been associated with the longer line. For all ages, choice reaction times were related to differences in, and ratios of, line lengths. (BC)

This study evaluated eye-blink conditioning in 11 persons with autism (ages 11 to 22). Compared to matched controls, persons with autism learned the task faster but performed short-latency, high-amplitude conditioned responses. Results suggest this population has the ability to rapidly associate paired stimuli but may have impairments in…

Arima's Discrimination Learning Test (DLT) was reconfigured, made into a self-paced mode, and administered to potential recruits in order to determine if: (1) a previous study indicating a lack of difference in learning performance between white and nonwhites would hold up; and (2) the correlations between scores attained on the DLT and scores…