The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of cognitive chunking techniques among first-semester group-piano music majors. The ability to group discrete pieces of information into larger, more meaningful chunks is essential for efficient cognitive processing. Since reading keyboard music and playing the piano is a cognitively complex…

Selective attention has been hypothesized to reduce distractor interference at both perceptual and postperceptual levels (Lavie, 2005), respectively, by focusing perceptual resources on the attended location and by blocking at postperceptual levels distractors that survive perceptual selection. This study measured the impact of load on these…

Studies into the effects of ageing on language in adults with Down syndrome (DS) have tended to rely on measures that lack sensitivity to change because they fail to explore across linguistic domains or rely on proxy reports. The study aim was to use measures of receptive and expressive language from studies of younger individuals with DS in…

Metacognition is one of the promising contemporary research fields in psychology and education. The concept has been introduced to describe and explain how people gain control over their learning and thinking, particularly in the case of cognitive failures and difficulties they meet when dealing with information processing and problem solving…

Subjects performed a rapid feeling-of-knowing task developed by (Reder, L. M., & Ritter, F. (1992). "What determines initial feeling of knowing? Familiarity with question terms, not with the answer." "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," 18, 435-451), while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to identify…

Our environment contains regularities distributed in space and time that can be detected by way of statistical learning. This unsupervised learning occurs without intent or awareness, but little is known about how it relates to other types of learning, how it affects perceptual processing, and how quickly it can occur. Here we use fMRI during…

The current study explored the elaborative retrieval hypothesis as an explanation for the testing effect: the tendency for a memory test to enhance retention more than restudying. In particular, the retrieval process during testing may activate elaborative information related to the target response, thereby increasing the chances that activation…

In 5 experiments, we studied precautionary decisions in which participants decided whether or not to buy insurance with specified cost against an undesirable event with specified probability and cost. We compared the risks taken for precautionary decisions with those taken for equivalent monetary gambles. Fitting these data to Tversky and…

Recent evidence suggests the existence of multiple cognitive mechanisms that support the general cognitive ability factor (g). Working memory and processing speed are the two best established candidate mechanisms. Relatively little attention has been given to the possibility that associative learning is an additional mechanism contributing to g.…

Effects of perceptual and cognitive loads on spoken-word recognition have so far largely escaped investigation. This study lays the foundations of a psycholinguistic approach to speech recognition in adverse conditions that draws upon the distinction between energetic masking, i.e., listening environments leading to signal degradation, and…

The current study examined the contribution of brain areas affected by Parkinson's disease (PD) to sequence learning, with a specific focus on response-related processes, spatial attentional control, and executive functioning. Patients with mild PD, patients with moderate PD, and healthy age-matched participants performed three tasks--a sequence…

Like adults, infants use working memory to represent occluded objects and can update these memory representations to reflect changes to a scene that unfold over time. Here we tested the limits of infants' ability to update object representations in working memory. Eleven-month-old infants participated in a modified foraging task in which they saw…

Two experiments investigated children's communicative perspective-taking ability. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-old children were tested on two referential communication tasks, as well as on measures of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Results document children's emergent use of the perspective of their speaking…

A model of memory retrieval is described. The model embodies four main claims: (a) temporal memory--traces of items are represented in memory partly in terms of their temporal distance from the present; (b) scale-similarity--similar mechanisms govern retrieval from memory over many different timescales; (c) local distinctiveness--performance on a…

P. B. Sederberg, M. W. Howard, and M. J. Kahana have proposed an updated version of the temporal-context model (TCM-A). In doing so, they accepted the challenge of developing a single-store model to account for the dissociations between short- and long-term recency effects that were reviewed by E. J. Davelaar, Y. Goshen-Gottstein, A. Ashkenazi, H.…