How working memory supports dual-task performance is the focus of a long-standing debate. Most previous research on this topic has focused on participant performance data. In three experiments, we investigated whether changes in participant-reported strategies across single- and dual-task conditions might help resolve this debate by offering new…

Attempting to guess an answer to a memory question has repeatedly been shown to benefit memory for the answer compared to merely reading what the answer is, even when the guess is incorrect. In this study, we investigate 2 potential explanations for this effect in a single experimental procedure. According to the semantic explanation, the benefits…

Psychologists and educators have long pointed to myriad benefits of self-directed learning. Yet evidence of its efficacy in real-world domains is mixed and it remains unclear how it is constrained by basic perceptual and cognitive processes. Previous work suggests that, in particular, self-directed learning is affected by the way that people…

Generating errors followed by corrective feedback enhances retention more effectively than does reading--the benefit of errorful generation--but people tend to be unaware of this benefit. The current research explored this metacognitive unawareness, its effect on self-regulated learning, and how to alleviate or reverse it. People's beliefs about…

Learning to choose adaptively when faced with uncertain and variable outcomes is a central challenge for decision makers. This study examines repeated choice in dynamic probability learning tasks in which outcome probabilities changed either as a function of the choices participants made or independently of those choices. This presence/absence of…

The strength of conclusions about the adoption of different categorization strategies--and their implications for theories about the cognitive and neural bases of category learning--depend heavily on the techniques for identifying strategy use. We examine performance in an often-used "information-integration" category structure and…

While researchers have often sought to understand the learning curve in terms of multiple component processes, few studies have measured and mathematically modeled these processes on a complex task. In particular, there remains a need to reconcile how abrupt changes in strategy use can co-occur with gradual changes in task completion time. Thus,…

In nonmonotonic decision problems, the magnitude of outcomes can both increase and decrease over time depending on the state of the decision problem. These increases and decreases may occur repeatedly and result in a variety of possible outcome distributions. In many previously investigated sequential decision problems, in contrast, outcomes (or…

The authors used the operand-recognition paradigm (C. Thevenot, M. Fanget, & M. Fayol, 2007) in order to study the strategies used by adults to solve subtraction problems. This paradigm capitalizes on the fact that algorithmic procedures degrade the memory traces of the operands. Therefore, greater difficulty in recognizing them is expected…