In recognition, context effects often manifest as higher hit and false-alarm rates to probes tested in an old context compared with probes tested in a new context; sometimes, this concordant effect is accompanied by a discrimination advantage. According to the cue-overload account of context effects (Rutherford, 2004), context acts like any other…

When remembering over the short-term, long-term knowledge has a large effect on the number of correctly recalled items and little impact on memory for order. This is true, for example, when the effects of semantic category are examined. Contrary to what these findings suggest, Poirier et al. in 2015 proposed that memory for order relies on the…

Memory aids are now frequently provided to elementary and secondary school students to increase their success in achieving provincial curriculum standards. While such an accommodation may meet the immediate goal of improved academic performance it may not be warranted based on an actual long-term memory retrieval impairment and may therefore be…

How are scene representations stored in memory? Researchers have often posited that scene representations have a hierarchical structure with background elements providing a scaffold for more detailed foreground elements. To further investigate scene representation and the role of background and foreground information, we introduced a new stimulus…

Within the same learning context, learners' outcomes in terms of oral fluency vary greatly. This study tracked the relative contributions that first language (L1) and initial second language (L2) fluency skill and working memory (WM) made to L2 fluency development. We assessed the performance of French-speaking Grade 6 learners' (n = 47, mean age:…

Most language experiences take place at the level of multiple sentences. However, previous studies of second language (L2) comprehension have typically focused on lexical- and sentence-level processing. Our study addresses this gap by examining auditory discourse comprehension in 32 English/French bilinguals. We tested the prediction of the noisy…

Through the process of "reconsolidation," reminders can temporarily destabilize memories and render them vulnerable to change. Recent rodent research has proposed that prediction error, or the element of surprise, is a key component of this process; yet, this hypothesis has never before been extended to complex episodic memories in…

This research examines the early emergence of source-monitoring abilities. Previous research has consistently demonstrated that children as young as 3 to 4 years of age do well on simple versions of action-based source-monitoring tasks. Research on even younger children, however, remains lacking. In this study we examined whether 2 1/2-year-olds…

The effects of the duration of remember and forget cues were examined to test the differential rehearsal account of item-based directed forgetting. In Experiments 1 and 2, cues were shown for 300, 600, or 900 ms, and a directed forgetting effect (better recognition of remember than forget items) was found at each duration. In addition, recognition…

Maljkovic and Nakayama have demonstrated memory influences in singleton search from one trial to the next, an effect they termed "priming of pop-out" (PoP). This effect was described as resulting from the persistence of an implicit memory trace, the influence of which could be observed for around 5-8 subsequent trials. Thomson and…

Four experiments examined the roles of extended surfaces and the number of points in the boundary superiority effect in goal localization. Participants learned the locations of 4 objects in the presence of a boundary, landmarks, or both in an immersive virtual environment by reproducing the locations with feedback. Participants then localized the…

A problematic issue for forensic interviewers is that young children provide limited information in response to open-ended recall questions. Although quantity of information is greater if children are asked more focused prompts and closed question types such as yes/no or forced choice questions, the quality of their responses is potentially…

The production effect is the substantial benefit to memory of having studied information aloud as opposed to silently. MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, and Ozubko (2010) have explained this enhancement by suggesting that a word studied aloud acquires a distinctive encoding record and that recollecting this record supports identifying a word…

The word length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, has been termed one of the benchmark findings that any theory of immediate memory must account for. Indeed, the effect led directly to the development of working memory and the phonological loop, and it is viewed as the best remaining…

Recent evidence suggests that rats require an intact hippocampus in order to recognize familiar objects when they encounter them again in a different context. The two experiments reported here further examined how changes in context affect rats' performance on the novel-object preference (NOP) test of object-recognition memory, and how those…