When reporting from memory, people may often be asked unanswerable questions--questions for which the correct answer has never been encoded. These unanswerable questions should be met with an "I don't know" response. Previous research has shown that a manipulation commonly used to enhance memory at retrieval--context…

Children have traditionally been viewed as less reliable witnesses than are adults. More recently, a concept known as developmental reversals, has brought this view into question. Developmental reversals have demonstrated that in certain contexts, children produce fewer false memories than adults. The primary paradigm used to demonstrate…

The temporal contiguity effect (TCE) is the tendency for the recall of one event to cue recall of other events originally experienced nearby in time. Retrieved context theory proposes that the TCE results from fundamental properties of episodic memory: binding of events to a drifting context representation during encoding and the reinstatement of…

Redundant modifiers can facilitate referential interpretation by narrowing attention to intended referents. This is intriguing because, on traditional accounts, redundancy should impair comprehension. Little is known, however, about the effects of redundancy on older adults' comprehension. Older adults may show different patterns due to…

Recent context-control learning studies have shown that switch costs are reduced in a particular context predicting a high probability of switching as compared to another context predicting a low probability of switching. These context-specific switch probability effects suggest that control of task sets, through experience, can become associated…

This article examines how semantic memory processes influence the items that are considered by decision makers in memory-based preferential choice. Experiments 1A through 1C ask participants to list the choice items that come to their minds while deliberating in a variety of everyday choice settings. These experiments use semantic space models to…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore when and how Mandarin-speaking children use contextual cues to normalize speech variability in perceiving lexical tones. Two different cognitive mechanisms underlying speech normalization (lower level acoustic normalization and higher level acoustic-phonemic normalization) were investigated through the…

In Troyer and Kutas (2018), individual differences in knowledge of the world of Harry Potter (HP) rapidly modulated individuals' average electrical brain potentials to contextually supported words in sentence endings. Using advances in single-trial electroencephalogram analysis, we examined whether this relationship is strictly a result of domain…

Learning new vocabulary from context typically requires multiple encounters during which word meaning can be retrieved from memory or inferred from context. We compared the effect of memory retrieval and context inferences on short- and long-term retention in three experiments. Participants studied novel words and then practiced the words either…

Whereas executive functions are known to be closely tied to successful language processing in children and younger adults, less is known about how age-related decline in these functions affects language processing in elderly adults. Because the abilities to use linguistic context and resolve potential ambiguities such as between an idiom's…

The RI-Val model of comprehension includes a validation process in which linkages formed by integration are matched against active memory. In five experiments, we investigated factors that influence validation. Reading times were measured on target sentences that contained either correct information or semantically related, but incorrect content.…

Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of…

Hierarchical control of skilled performance depends on chunking of several lower-level units into a single higher-level unit. The present study examined the relationship between chunking and recognition of trained materials in the context of typewriting. In 3 experiments, participants were trained with typing nonwords and were later tested on…

This investigation aimed to establish retrospective time judgments as markers of internal context change across 2 memory paradigms, the effects of which have been attributed to internal context change by some researchers. Experiment 1 involved the list-method directed forgetting paradigm and established that the forget group significantly…

Strengthening some items in a list of words impairs free recall of the remaining items in the list--a phenomenon known as the list-strength effect (LSE; e.g., Tulving & Hastie, 1972). Research indicates that whether the LSE is observed depends on the nature of the strengthening manipulation, and the effect is attributed to the enhancement of…