This self-study presents an autoethnography which combines the writing about memories of meaningful formal and informal learning I experienced during my childhood, and self-reflection on those episodes to identify associations which are likely to have inspired my pedagogical beliefs and practice as a teacher educator. It has been experienced as an…

Laboratory research has demonstrated that when students are instructed to use retrieval (i.e., recalling from memory information to be learned) rather than rereading (i.e., reading the material repeatedly) they learn better. However, little is known about spontaneous use of retrieval. In the present studies, we designed a scale to measure…

Empathy is crucial for our social life, with evidences suggesting that executive function is the cognitive basis of empathy. However, debates about the causal relationship between executive function and empathy still exist. A two-wave and one-year longitudinal follow-up experiment is conducted to investigate this problem, mainly focusing on…

Previous research with adults has shown mixed findings regarding the correlation between specificity and detailedness within autobiographical memories, and their associations with depressive symptoms. However, minimal research has tested these links in adolescents, despite the importance of this developmental period. The present investigation…

The current experiment examined the effect of forewarning on children's (11 to 12 years of age) and adults' spontaneous false memory creation by presenting participants with semantically related word lists that are often used to elicit false memories (i.e., Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm). The forewarning consisted of an explanation of…

The NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery (NIHTB-CB) was developed for epidemiological and longitudinal studies across a wide age span. Such a tool may be useful for intervention trials in conditions characterized by intellectual disability (ID), such as Williams syndrome (WS). Three NIHTB-CB tasks, including two executive functioning (Flanker,…

One developmental task faced by children is to identify, remember, and learn from epistemic and moral agents around them who are known to be good or virtuous. Here, in 2 studies, we examined U.S children's (N = 138; 55% female, 45% male; predominantly White, middle-class) memory processes for agents varying in moral and epistemic virtue. In Study…

This article discusses the role of the three components of executive functions (EF) in geometric understanding. Discussing several examples of geometry problems, this article shows how EF are actively employed to solve geometry problems. Inhibition as the first component of EF helps the individual to suppress contextually irrelevant information.…

This study aimed to explore the possible indirect pathway between maternal reminiscing style and child socioemotional functioning (prosocial behaviors and emotional adjustment difficulties) through children's autobiographical memory (elaboration and specificity). A secondary exploratory aim was to examine whether cultural context moderated these…

Perceivers spontaneously segment ongoing activity into discrete events. This segmentation is important for the moment-by-moment understanding of events, but may also be critical for how events are encoded into episodic memory. In 3 experiments, we used priming to test the possibility that perceptual event boundaries organize memory for everyday…

Longer free time between presentation of verbal list items often leads to better immediate serial recall. The present series of three experiments demonstrates that this beneficial effect of time is more general than has been known: It is found for verbal items presented visually and auditorily (Experiments 1 and 2), and also when people engage in…

Associating names to faces can be challenging, in part because this task lacks an inherent semantic relationship between a face and name. The current study seeks to understand whether bolstering names with cross-modal cues--specifically, name tags--may aid memory for face and name pairings. In a series of five experiments, we investigated whether…

Ulric Neisser was the initiator of the contemporary psychology of autobiographical memory, as well as the founder of the ecological approach to human cognition. The present article reviews his empirical and theoretical contributions to an issue which is at the heart of the contemporary debate on autobiographical memory: that is, autobiographical…

Interim tests of previously studied information can potentiate subsequent learning of new information, in part, because retrieval-based processes help to reduce proactive interference from previously learned information. We hypothesized that an effect similar to this forward testing effect would also occur when making judgments of (prior) learning…

This paper draws from the writings of Michel Foucault and his recently reconsidered provocations on race and racialization. Using Foucault's definition of 'internal racism,' race is understood as a complex set of correlations that are employed for the purpose of establishing (ab)normality and exercising various forms of expulsion. Racialization is…