Humans actively seek information to reduce uncertainty, providing insight on how our decisions causally affect the world. While we know that episodic memories can help support future goal-oriented behaviors, little is known about how hypothesis testing during exploration influences episodic memory. To investigate this question, we designed a…

An essential feature of episodic memory is the ability to recall the multiple elements relating to one event from the multitude of elements relating to other, potentially similar events. Hippocampal pattern separation is thought to play a fundamental role in this process, by orthogonalizing the representations of overlapping events during…

Reality-monitoring errors occur when internally generated thoughts are remembered as external occurrences. We hypothesized that sleep-dependent memory consolidation could reduce them by strengthening connections between items and their contexts during an afternoon nap. Participants viewed words and imagined their referents. Pictures of the…

With a rising aging population, it is important to develop behavioral tasks that assess and track cognitive decline, and to identify protective factors that promote healthy brain aging. Mnemonic discrimination tasks that rely on pattern separation mechanisms are a promising metric to detect subtle age-related memory impairments. Behavioral…

The formation of mate recognition memory in mice is associated with neural changes at the reciprocal dendrodendritic synapses between glutamatergic mitral cell (MC) projection neurons and GABAergic granule cell (GC) interneurons in the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB). Although noradrenaline (NA) plays a critical role in the formation of the memory,…

The target articles explore a common hypothesis pertaining to whether perceptually degrading materials will improve reasoning, memory, and metamemory. Outcomes are mixed, yet some evidence was garnered in support of a version of the disfluency hypothesis that includes moderators, and along with evidence from prior research, researchers will likely…

Framing metacognitive judgments of learning (JOLs) in terms of the likelihood of forgetting rather than remembering consistently yields a counterintuitive outcome: The mean of participants' forget-framed JOLs is often higher (after reverse-scoring) than the mean of their remember-framed JOLs, suggesting greater confidence in memory. In the present…

Three experiments investigated the effects of making errors oneself, as compared to just hearing the correct answer without error generation, hearing another person make an error, or being "on-the-hook," that is, possibly but not necessarily being the person who would be "called-on" to give a response. In all three experiments,…

The ability to act on behalf of one's future self is related to uniquely human abilities such as planning, delay of gratification, and goal attainment. Although prospection develops rapidly during early childhood, little is known about the mechanisms that support its development. Here we explored whether encouraging children to talk about their…

How does the concurrent use of language affect perception and memory for exemplars? Labels cue more general category information than a specific exemplar. Applying labels can affect the resulting memory for an exemplar. Here 3 alternative hypotheses are proposed for the role of labeling an exemplar at encoding: (a) labels distort memory toward the…

Initial learning can interfere with subsequent learning (proactive interference [PI]), but recent work indicates initial testing can reduce PI. Here, we tested 2 alternative hypotheses of this effect: Does testing reduce PI by constraining retrieval to the target list, or by facilitating a postretrieval monitoring process? Participants first…

The recognition heuristic (RH) theory predicts that, in comparative judgment tasks, if one object is recognized and the other is not, the recognized one is chosen. The memory-state heuristic (MSH) extends the RH by assuming that choices are not affected by recognition judgments per se, but by the memory states underlying these judgments (i.e.,…

Introduction: The aim of this study was to determine whether individuals with congenital blindness make more recognizable drawings of known objects that are furniture sized (table, man, tree) rather than hand sized (egg, coconut, banana; Hypothesis 1). We also investigated whether knowledge that the tactile drawings had been produced by people who…

Purpose: This was an investigation of the dimensionality of oral and written language to test the hypothesis that a two-factor model with sound/word and sentence/discourse language levels would best fit language and literacy data for a population-based sample in the school-age years. Method: A stratified secondary data set of 1,500 participants…

Purpose: Specific language impairment (SLI) is a developmental disorder that affects language and motor development in the absence of a clear cause. An explanation for these impairments is offered by the procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH), which argues that motor difficulties in SLI are due to deficits in procedural memory. The aim of this study…