Through the process of "reconsolidation," reminders can temporarily destabilize memories and render them vulnerable to change. Recent rodent research has proposed that prediction error, or the element of surprise, is a key component of this process; yet, this hypothesis has never before been extended to complex episodic memories in…

Three experiments investigated the learning of simple associations in a color-word contingency task. Participants responded manually to the print colors of 3 words, with each word associated strongly to 1 of the 3 colors and weakly to the other 2 colors. Despite the words being irrelevant, response times to high-contingency stimuli and to…

The conflict monitoring account posits that globally high levels of conflict trigger engagement of top-down control; however, recent findings point to the mercurial nature of top-down control in high conflict contexts. The current study examined the potential moderating effect of associative learning on conflict-triggered top-down control…