In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Response…

The literature on human and animal learning suggests that individuals attend to and act on cues differently based on the order in which they were learned. Recent studies have proposed that one specific type of learning outcome, the highlighting effect, can serve as a framework for understanding a number of early cognitive milestones. However,…

As speakers interact, they add references to their common ground, which they can then reuse to facilitate listener comprehension. However, all references are not equally likely to be reused. The purpose of this study was to shed light on how the speakers' conceptualizations of the referents under discussion affect reuse (along with a generation…

The rising popularity of commercial anatomy e-learning tools has been sustained, in part, due to increased annual enrollment and a reduction in laboratory hours across educational institutions. While e-learning tools continue to gain popularity, the research methodologies used to investigate their impact on learning remain imprecise. As new user…

Visual working memory (VWM) is an online memory buffer that is typically assumed to be immune to source memory confusions. Accordingly, the few studies that have investigated the role of proactive interference (PI) in VWM tasks found only a modest PI effect at best. In contrast, a recent study has found a substantial PI effect in that performance…

Seeing pictures of objects activates the motor cortex and can have an influence on subsequent grasping actions. However, the exact nature of the motor representations evoked by these pictures is unclear. For example, action plans engaged by pictures could be most affected by direct visual input and computed online based on object shape.…

Working memory is typically defined as a system devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and processing of information. However, the interplay between these 2 functions is still a matter of debate in the literature, with views ranging from complete independence to complete dependence. The time-based resource-sharing model assumes that a central…

A central question for models of visual working memory is whether the number of objects people can remember depends on object complexity. Some influential "slot" models of working memory capacity suggest that people always represent 3-4 objects and that only the fidelity with which these objects are represented is affected by object…

Memories for spatial locations often show systematic errors toward the central value of the surrounding region. The Category Adjustment (CA) model suggests that this bias is due to a Bayesian combination of categorical and metric information, which offers an optimal solution under conditions of uncertainty (Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Duncan,…

Stimuli co-occurring with targets in a detection task are better remembered than stimuli co-occurring with distractors--the attentional boost effect (ABE). The ABE is of interest because it is an exception to the usual finding that divided attention during encoding impairs memory. The effect has been demonstrated in tests of item memory but it is…

Spatial memory research has attributed systematic bias in location estimates to a combination of a noisy memory trace with a prior structure that people impose on the space. Little is known about intraindividual stability and interindividual variation in these patterns of bias. In the current work, we align recent empirical and theoretical work on…

Three experiments examined the immediate free recall (IFR) of auditory-verbal and visuospatial materials from single-modality and dual-modality lists. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with between 1 and 16 spoken words, with between 1 and 16 visuospatial dot locations, or with between 1 and 16 words "and" dots with synchronized…

The purpose of this study was to examine what components of executive function (EF)--inhibition, shifting and updating/working memory--predict reading comprehension in young adults. Ninety university students (65 females, 25 males; mean age = 21.82 years) were assessed on shifting (Planned Connections and Colour/Shape Shifting), inhibition…

Research has highlighted the role of working memory and inhibition on the performance of pupils in mathematics. This study was an attempt to look into the relationship between executive function including working memory capacity and inhibition on the one hand and mathematical abilities on the other. 30 primary school students were selected from…

Joint attention--the mutual focus of 2 individuals on an item--speeds detection and discrimination of target information. However, what happens to that information beyond the initial perceptual episode? To fully comprehend and engage with our immediate environment also requires working memory (WM), which integrates information from second to…