Episodic memories for autobiographical events that happen in unique spatiotemporal contexts are central to defining who we are. Yet, before 2 years of age, children are unable to form or store episodic memories for recall later in life, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. Here, we studied the development of allocentric spatial memory, a…

How do perceivers apply knowledge to instances they have never experienced before? On one hand, listeners might use idealized representations that do not contain specific details. On the other, they might recognize and process information based on more detailed memory representations. The current study examined the latter possibility with respect…

We investigated the time course of associative recognition using the response signal procedure, whereby a stimulus is presented and followed after a variable lag by a signal indicating that an immediate response is required. More specifically, we examined the effects of associative fan (the number of associations that an item has with other items…

When other individuals move, we interpret their movements as discrete, hierarchically-organized, goal-directed actions. However, the mechanisms that integrate visible movement features into actions are poorly understood. Here, we consider two sequence learning mechanisms--transitional probability-based (TP) and position-based encoding…

We propose and evaluate a memory-based model of Hick's law, the approximately linear increase in choice reaction time with the logarithm of set size (the number of stimulus-response alternatives). According to the model, Hick's law reflects a combination of associative interference during retrieval from declarative memory and occasional savings…

Dual Process Theories (DPT) of reasoning posit that judgments are mediated by both fast, automatic processes and more deliberate, analytic ones. A critical, but unanswered question concerns the issue of monitoring and control: When do reasoners rely on the first, intuitive output and when do they engage more effortful thinking? We hypothesised…

Many human interactions involve pieces of information being passed from one person to another, raising the question of how this process of information transmission is affected by the cognitive capacities of the agents involved. Bartlett (1932) explored the influence of memory biases on the "serial reproduction" of information, in which one…

Perceptual decision-making is thought to involve a gradual accrual of noisy evidence. Temporal integration of the evidence reduces the relative contribution of dynamic internal noise to the decision variable, thereby boosting its signal-to-noise ratio. We aimed to estimate the internal evidence guiding perceptual decisions over time, using a novel…

The human ability to focus memory retrieval operations on a particular list, episode or memory structure has not been fully appreciated or documented. In Experiment 1-3, we make it increasingly difficult for participants to switch between a less recent list (multiple study opportunities), and a more recent list (single study opportunity). Task…

Reports that infants in the second year of life can attribute false beliefs to others have all used a "search" paradigm in which an agent with a false belief about an object's location searches for the object. The present research asked whether 18-month-olds would still demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with a novel "non-search"…

How are spatial and object attention coordinated to achieve rapid object learning and recognition during eye movement search? How do prefrontal priming and parietal spatial mechanisms interact to determine the reaction time costs of intra-object attention shifts, inter-object attention shifts, and shifts between visible objects and covertly cued…

Evolutionary psychologists often propose that humans carry around "stone-age" brains, along with a toolkit of cognitive adaptations designed originally to solve hunter-gatherer problems. This perspective predicts that optimal cognitive performance might sometimes be induced by ancestrally-based problems, those present in ancestral environments,…

Visualizing spatial material is a cornerstone of human problem solving, but human visualization capacity is sharply limited. To investigate the sources of this limit, we developed a new task to measure visualization accuracy for verbally-described spatial paths (similar to street directions), and implemented a computational process model to…

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…

Explanations for the attentional blink (AB; a deficit in identifying the second of two targets when presented 200-500ms after the first) have recently shifted from limitations in memory consolidation to disruptions in cognitive control. With a new model based on the threaded cognition theory of multi-tasking we propose a different explanation: the…