In everyday life, humans rely on working memory (WM) processes to make sense of relationships between linguistic elements that are not linearly adjacent. For example, to understand the sentence "The dog that the cat chased is cute," we encode the referent "the dog" into WM, maintain and retrieve it after reading the verb…

The role that the information technology (IT) department serves is governed by the corporate culture and how it values the use of knowledge, including IT, to achieve a strategic competitive advantage. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the potential relationships between information acquisition, knowledge dissemination, shared…

Previous research has found mixed results for a link between executive function and perspective-taking. One proposed reason for this is that perspective-taking during comprehension tasks may not be internally reliable. This dissertation presents two large individual differences experiments with multiple perspective-taking during comprehension and…

A major question for the study of learning and memory is how to tailor learning experiences to promote knowledge that generalizes to new situations. In two experiments, we used category learning as a representative domain to test two factors thought to influence the acquisition of conceptual knowledge: the number of training examples (set size)…

While visual working memory has a short lifetime, residual representations can persist and disrupt currently maintained information. This phenomenon is known as proactive interference (PI), and the present study investigated whether the representations underpinning item-specific PI lose details over time. This would be expected if the memories…

There has been considerable interest in what components of decision-making change when speed or accuracy is stressed. In many early studies, quite strict assumptions were made about parameter invariance across experimental conditions (sometimes called selective influence). Here we fit the standard diffusion model to the data from four large…

A personal account of a school group museum visit that had an impact beyond the classroom, crossing language barriers, and transcending time and geographies.

Numerous studies have shown that learned information practiced by testing is better retained than that practiced by restudying (the testing effect). However, results are inconsistent regarding the effect of working memory (WM) capacity on the testing effect. Here, we hypothesize that the effect of WM only emerges when task demands challenge WM…

The present study aimed to investigate the affect-cognition interplay in young and older adults by studying prospective memory (PM), the realisation of delayed intentions. While most previous studies on the topic were conducted in the laboratory, we examined the influence of naturally occurring affect on PM tasks carried out in participants'…

People do not constantly watch for accidents and crimes. With their attention focused elsewhere, potential witnesses may fail to notice a crime and experience inattentional blindness. We investigated the impact of inattentional blindness on eyewitness awareness and memory. Participants watched a video in which a theft occurs. We manipulated the…

There is ongoing debate on whether adults' narratives of trauma memories are similarly or less coherent than those of non-trauma memories. For child maltreatment, relevant studies have focused on child/adolescent narratives rather than adult narratives of sexual abuse and found that these narratives were less coherent than non-abuse narratives.…

The relationship between working memory (WM) and second-language (L2) reading has been extensively examined, with mixed results. Our meta-analysis models the potential impact of under-researched variables considered to moderate this relationship. Results from 74 studies (228 correlations) showed a significant, small relationship between WM and L2…

The present work was conducted to re-examine the findings of Agarwal et al. ("Applied Cognitive Psychology," 22(7), 861-876, 2008), which showed that both closed-book tests (with feedback) and open-book tests increased learning outcomes after 1 week compared to simple re-study of the same materials. However, contrary to often found…

From 2022, New Zealand schools are teaching a new compulsory history curriculum that aims to teach diverse New Zealand histories, while foregrounding the centrality of Maori histories and the impacts of colonisation. The new curriculum will upend a long history of 'forgetting' the nation's contentious and conflictual past, and in particular the…

Humans actively seek information to reduce uncertainty, providing insight on how our decisions causally affect the world. While we know that episodic memories can help support future goal-oriented behaviors, little is known about how hypothesis testing during exploration influences episodic memory. To investigate this question, we designed a…