Autobiographical remembering may undergo significant transformations in the digital age, in which the omnipresence of digital tools has led to an increased density of recorded life episodes. To gain deeper insights into these processes, we conducted an experimental think-aloud study in which participants (N = 41) had to remember an important day…

Our aim in the current study was to examine how different diary methods might impact the results of involuntary memory studies. We compared three different commonly used diary methods, record all memories experienced per day, record up to two memories per day, or record only the first two per day. Results showed that the record-all group had the…

The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate…

Memory for the time associated with past events is critical for our understanding of episodic memory and its development. Relatively little is known about the factors that influence temporal memory development. One such factor examined in the literature is semantic knowledge for time (conventional time knowledge; CTK). Other possible factors…

Evidence implicating theta rhythms in declarative memory encoding and retrieval, together with the notion that both retrieval and consolidation involve memory reinstatement or replay, suggests that post-learning theta rhythm modulation can promote early consolidation of newly formed memories. Building on earlier work employing theta neurofeedback,…

Generated information is better recognized and recalled than information that is read. This generation effect has been replicated several times for different types of material, including texts. Perhaps the most influential demonstration is by McDaniel, Einstein, Dunay, and Cobb ("Journal of Memory and Language," 1986, 25(6), 645-656;…

Visual system is crucial to autobiographical memory. Research tended to show that blind adults may compensate for the loss of visual information in retrieval of their autobiographical memories. Much less is known about how blind children's autobiographical memory develops in the absence of visual information. Using cue-word methodology, 36 sighted…

Item memory (e.g., recall or recognition of specific items) can reactively change when metacognitively monitored via judgments of learning (JOLs). The current research explores whether memory for inter-item relations (e.g., semantic relations among list items) is reactively influenced by JOLs. Participants in Experiment 1 studied rhyming word…

When memories are reactivated during sleep, they are potentially transformed and strengthened. However, disturbed sleep may make this process ineffective. In a prior study, memories formed shortly before sleep were weakened by auditory stimulation when that stimulation provoked memory reactivation while also disrupting sleep -- a procedure known…

Throughout prolonged tasks, visual attention fluctuates temporally in response to the present stimuli, task demands, and changes in available attentional resources. This temporal fluctuation has downstream effects on memory for stimuli presented during the task. Researchers have established that detection of a target (e.g., a square of a color to…

Contemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioral evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of the present work was to test whether words' degree of social relevance, or "socialness", influences…

Predicting what we will remember and forget is crucial for daily functioning. We were interested in whether evaluating something as likely to be remembered or forgotten leads to enhanced memory for "both" forms of information relative to information that was not judged for memorability. We presented participants with lists of words to…

The current study examined why people take and delete photos with smartphone cameras, and participants' recollective experiences with saved and deleted photos. Two mixed-methods surveys asked undergraduates (Study 1) and an international online sample (Study 2) to review both recently taken and recently deleted photos from their smartphones' photo…

Metamemory judgments, defined as predictions of memory performance, are often influenced by misleading cues, such as fluency. However, how fluency cues compete to influence retrospective metamemory judgments is still unclear. The present study investigated how multiple fluency cues concurrently influence immediate feeling of knowing (FOK)…

Episodic retrieval plays a functional-adaptive role in supporting divergent creative thinking, the ability to creatively combine different pieces of information. However, the same constructive memory process that provides this benefit can also lead to memory errors. Prior behavioral work has shown that there is a positive correlation between the…