Five experiments were conducted to examine how unsuccessful retrieval influences learning and subsequent memory. We used a cued-recall paradigm that produces many unsuccessful retrieval attempts (followed by feedback) and allows comparisons to be made between later memory for these trials and trials that only required reading or studying the…

In three experiments, we evaluated remembering and intentional forgetting of attitude statements that were either congruent or incongruent with participants' own political attitudes. In Experiment 1, significant directed forgetting was obtained for incongruent statements, but not for congruent statements. In addition, in the remember group, recall…

The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-fourth edition (WAIS-IV) and the Wechsler Memory Scale-fourth edition (WMS-IV) were co-developed to be used individually or as a combined battery of tests. The independent factor structure of each of the tests has been identified; however, the combined factor structure has yet to be determined. Confirmatory…

Can people make perfect use of task-relevant information in working memory (WM)? Specifically, when questioned about an item in an array that does not happen to be in WM, can participants take into account other items that are in WM, eliminating them as response candidates? To address this question, an ideal-responder model that assumes perfect…

Recent research on eye movements during scene viewing has primarily focused on where the eyes fixate. But eye fixations also differ in their durations. Here we investigated whether fixation durations in scene viewing are under the direct and immediate control of the current visual input. Subjects freely viewed photographs of scenes in preparation…

Millions of adults in the United States lack the necessary literacy skills for most living wage jobs. For students from adult learning classes, we used a lexical decision task to measure their knowledge of words and we used a decision-making model (Ratcliff's, 1978, diffusion model) to abstract the mechanisms underlying their performance from…

Cognitive load theory (CLT) (Sweller 1988, 1998, 2010) provides us a guiding framework for designing instructional materials. CLT differentiates three subtypes of cognitive load: intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load. The three cognitive loads are theorized based on the number of simultaneously processed elements in working memory.…

Localist models of spreading activation (SA) and models assuming distributed representations offer very different takes on semantic priming, a widely investigated paradigm in word recognition and semantic memory research. In this study, we implemented SA in an attractor neural network model with distributed representations and created a unified…

We examined the role of working memory (WM) in dynamic decision making by having participants perform decision-making tasks under single-task or dual-task conditions. In 2 experiments participants performed dynamic decision-making tasks in which they chose 1 of 2 options on each trial. The decreasing option always gave a larger immediate reward…

It is known that visual working memory capacity is limited, but the nature of this limit remains a subject of controversy. Increasingly, two factors are thought to limit visual memory: an object-based limit associated with so-called "slots" models, and an information-based limit associated with resource models. Recently, Barton, Ester, and Awh…

Limits in visual working memory (VWM) strongly constrain human performance across many tasks. However, the nature of these limits is not well understood. In this article we develop an ideal observer analysis of human VWM by deriving the expected behavior of an optimally performing but limited-capacity memory system. This analysis is framed around…

Current theories concerning individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) suggest that WMC reflects the ability to control the focus of attention and resist interference and distraction. The current set of experiments tested whether susceptibility to distraction is partially responsible for the established relationship between…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

The American Psychological Foundation (APF) Gold Medal Awards recognize distinguished and enduring records of accomplishment in four areas of psychology: the application of psychology, the practice of psychology, psychology in the public interest, and the science of psychology. The 2011 recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the…

The effects of embedding standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists into stories whose context biased interpretation either toward or away from the overall themes of the DRM lists on both true and false recognition were investigated with 7- and 11-year-olds. These biased story contexts were compared with the same children's susceptibility to…