Properties of auditory working memory for sounds that lack strong semantic associations and are not readily verbalized or sung are poorly understood. We investigated auditory working memory capacity for lists containing 2-6 easily discriminable abstract sounds synthesized within a constrained timbral space, at delays of 1-6 s (Experiment 1), and…

Recent results from Vo and Wolfe (2012b) suggest that the application of memory to visual search may be task specific: Previous experience searching for an object facilitated later search for that object, but object information acquired during a different task did not appear to transfer to search. The latter inference depended on evidence that a…

Previous research using the contextual cuing paradigm has revealed both quantitative and qualitative differences in learning depending on whether repeated contexts are defined by letter arrays or real-world scenes. To clarify the relative contributions of visual features and semantic information likely to account for such differences, the typical…

Previous studies have shown that past and future temporal concepts are spatially represented (past being located to the left and future to the right in a mental time line). This study aims at further investigating the nature of this space-time conceptual metaphor, by testing whether the temporal reference of words orient spatial attention or…

Repetition blindness (RB) was investigated in a new paradigm in which effects could stem from items preceding or following a target. Speeded-response tasks in which 3 critical items (C1, C2, and C3) were sequentially presented on each trial. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were asked to judge whether C2 (the target) was present on each trial.…

Examines the latency of associative activation in memory by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between a prime word and a test word, thereby establishing the minimum SOA needed to produce a significant associative priming effect on lexical decision times. (Author/RK)

A cost-benefit and speed-accuracy analysis of semantic priming in a lexical decision task provided information relevant to the automatic-conscious distinction as well as to the operation of discriminability, criterion bias, and response bias in the facilitation. (Author/MH)

Three experiments examined short-term encoding processes of deaf signers for different aspects of signs from American Sign Language. Results indicated that deaf signers code signs at one level in terms of linguistically significant formational parameters. The semantic and iconic information of signs, however, has little effect on short-term…