In the cocktail party phenomenon, participants cannot attend to more than 1 stream of information, but sometimes detect their own name being presented in the irrelevant message during a selective listening task. Here we present a preregistered replication of the phenomenon, in which we also tested whether semantically unexpected words have a…

We report 3 empirical studies that represent the first systematic attempt to explore the relationship between emotional and decisional forgiveness and intentional forgetting. On this basis, we propose a model that provides a credible explanation for the relationship between forgiveness and forgetting. Specifically, we propose that engaging in…

In order to investigate the nature of complex problem solving (CPS) within the nomological network of cognitive abilities, few studies have simultantiously considered working memory and intelligence, and results are inconsistent. The Brunswik symmetry principle was recently discussed as a possible explanation for the inconsistent findings because…

Two experiments assessed how racial ambiguity and racial salience moderates the cross-race effect (CRE). In experiment 1, White and Black participants studied and identified the race of Asian, Black, Latino, and White faces that varied in ethnic typicality (high or low ET). For White participants, the CRE was larger when comparing high-ET White…

A wealth of research suggests that emotion enhances memory. Yet, this enhancement is not uniform. While some theories posit that emotion enhances memory for sensory/perceptual information, such an enhancement has not been observed in mnemonic detail production. However, a focus on remote events (often more semanticized) may be masking an effect.…

Data on orienting and habituation to irrelevant sound can distinguish between task-specific and general accounts of auditory distraction: Distractors either disrupt specific cognitive processes (e.g., Jones, 1993; Salamé & Baddeley, 1982), or remove more general-purpose attentional resources from any attention-demanding task (e.g., Cowan,…

Memory for the temporal order of past events is a critical capacity; however, relatively little is known about its development and the processes that support it in early to middle childhood. The aim of this study was to examine children's memory for the temporal order of real-world events. Four-five-year-old (n = 36), 6-7-year-old (n = 45) and…

Background: Face-identity processing declines with age. Few studies have examined whether face-identity processing abilities can be measured independently from general cognitive abilities in older adults (OA). This question has practical implications for the assessment of face-identity processing abilities in OA and theoretical implications for…

Reflection and Connections at the University of Oregon (UO) Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) like all educational offerings at the UO, moved online with just over a week's notice. Those associated with Reflections and Connections, recognizing the importance of this program to the social well-being of those participating, decided to maintain…

An adaptive memory system should prioritize information surrounding a powerful learning event that may prove useful for predicting future meaningful events. The behavioral tagging hypothesis provides a mechanistic framework to interpret how weak experiences persist as durable memories through temporal association with a strong experience. Memories…

Sleep following learning facilitates the consolidation of memories. This effect has often been attributed to sleep-specific factors, such as the presence of sleep spindles or slow waves in the electroencephalogram (EEG). However, recent studies suggest that simply resting quietly while awake could confer a similar memory benefit. In the current…

Textbooks currently include many elaborations that describe, illustrate, and explain main ideas, increasing the length of these textbook chapters. The current study investigated if the cost in additional reading time that these elaborations impose is outweighed by benefits to memory for main ideas. Given that elaborations in textbooks sometimes…

Although widely used, the true-false test is often regarded as a superficial or even harmful test, one that lacks the pedagogical efficacy of more substantive tests (e.g., cued-recall or short-answer tests). Such charges, however, lack conclusive evidence and may, in some cases, be false. Across four experiments, we investigated how true-false…

Studies on "embodiment" show that moving your body can enhance cognition. We investigated such effects in a verbal memory task across age. In Study 1, children, adolescents, and young adults (N = 148) were tested in group sessions and reproduced number series of increasing length. In the "embodied" condition, subjects walked to…

When people encounter items that they believe will help them gain reward, they later remember them better than others. A recent model of emotional memory, the emotional context maintenance and retrieval model (eCMR), predicts that these effects would be stronger when stimuli that predict high and low reward can compete with each other during both…