Responding to a prospective memory task in the course of an ongoing activity requires switching tasks, which typically comes at a cost in performing the ongoing activity. Similarly, when the prospective memory task is deactivated, a cost can occur when previously relevant prospective memory targets appear in the course of the ongoing activity. In…

Young children can generalize from known to novel, but the underlying mechanism is still debated. Some argue that from an early age generalization is category-based and undergoes little development, while others believe that early generalization is similarity-based, and the use of categories emerges over time. The current research brings new…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to complete a task at the appropriate moment in the future. Past research has found reminders can improve PM performance in both laboratory and naturalistic settings, but few projects have examined the circumstances when and what types of reminders are most beneficial. Three experiments in…

The present study examined the role of hedges in a referential communication task. Pairs of participants received an identical set of cards, each card displaying a geometric configuration (a "tangram"). One participant, the director, instructed their partner, the matcher, to reproduce a series of predetermined tangram sequences using…

Large walls and other typical boundaries strongly influence neural activity related to navigation and the representations of spatial layouts. They are also major aids to reliable navigation behavior in young children and nonhuman animals. Is this because they are physical boundaries (barriers to movement), or because they present certain visual…

Working memory (WM) has a limited capacity; however, this limitation can be mitigated by selecting individual items from the set currently held in WM for prioritization. The selection mechanism underlying this prioritization ability is referred to as the focus of attention (FOA) in WM. Although impressive progress has been achieved in recent…

Several working memory (WM) theories assume a resource sharing between the maintenance of information and its processing, whereas other theories suppose that these 2 functions of WM rely on different pools of resources. Studies that addressed this question by examining whether dual-task costs occur in tasks combining processing and storage have…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search…

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 removed a key uncertainty in the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) illusion. The mean backward associative strength (MBAS) of DRM lists is the best-known predictor of this illusion, but it is confounded with semantic relations between lists and critical distractors. Thus, it is unclear whether associative relations, semantic relations, or both…

Retrieval fluency can affect the metacognitive judgments people make about their memory. In a study by Benjamin, Bjork, and Schwartz (1998), participants predicted they would be better able to recall the answers to questions they retrieved more quickly than the answers to questions they retrieved more slowly, despite actual performance going in…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

Collaborative inhibition (reduced recall in collaborative vs. nominal groups) is a robust phenomenon. However, it is possible that not everyone is as susceptible to collaborative inhibition, such as those higher in working memory capacity (WMC). In the current study, we examined the relationship between WMC and collaborative inhibition.…

We investigated participants' task set preparation by measuring changes in pupil diameter during a blank interval as they prepared for an easy (i.e., prosaccade) or difficult (i.e., antisaccade) trial. We used occasional thought probes to gauge "on-task" thoughts versus mind wandering. In both studies, participants' pupil diameters were…