Declarative memory performance is superior for items that were encoded in temporal proximity to reward delivery or expectancy. How reward-predicting contexts affect subsequent declarative memory formation in those contexts are, however, unknown. Using an ecological experimental setup in the form of a naturalistic driving simulator task, we…

We can incidentally learn regularities in a visual scene, and this kind of learning facilitates subsequent processing of similar scenes. One example of incidental learning is referred to as "contextual cueing," a phenomenon in which repetitive exposure to a particular spatial configuration facilitates visual search performance in the…

Self-generated information is better recognized and recalled than read information. This so-called generation effect has been replicated several times for different types of stimulus material, different generation tasks, and retention intervals. The present study investigated the impact of individual differences in learners' disposition to engage…

The ability to detect non-adjacent dependencies (i.e. between "a" and "b" in "aXb") in spoken input may support the acquisition of morpho-syntactic dependencies (e.g. "The princess 'is' kiss'ing' the frog"). Functional morphemes in morpho-syntactic dependencies are often marked by perceptual cues that render…

Eye gaze is a powerful directional cue that automatically evokes joint attention states. Even when faces are ignored, there is incidental learning of the reliability of the gaze cueing of another person, such that people who look away from targets are judged less trustworthy. In a series of experiments, we demonstrated further properties of the…

Research from the adaptive memory framework shows that thinking about words in terms of their survival value in an incidental learning task enhances their free recall relative to other semantic encoding strategies and intentional learning (Nairne, Pandeirada, & Thompson, 2008). We found similar results. When participants used incidental…

The expression of expert motor skills typically involves learning to perform a precisely timed sequence of movements. Research examining incidental sequence learning has relied on a perceptually cued task that gives participants exposure to repeating motor sequences but does not require timing of responses for accuracy. In the 1st experiment, a…

The present study utilizes traditional silent reading and a think-aloud procedure to investigate the role of lexical cues to meaning in the incidental acquisition of the Spanish future tense. A total of 161 beginning-level university students of Spanish participated in the study. Two versions of a reading passage that contained 13 target items…