The development of visual expertise is accompanied by enhanced visual object recognition memory within an expert domain. We aimed to understand the relationship between expertise and memory by modeling cognitive mechanisms. Participants with a measured range of birding expertise were recruited and tested on memory for birds (expert domain) and…

Two field studies tested the effect of alcohol intoxication on memory for a live interaction at immediate, delayed, and repeated testing. In Study 1 (N = 86), one researcher presented bar tenants with (misleading) questions regarding a preceding interaction with another researcher. One week later, participants' memory was tested again. Study 2…

The beneficial effects of exercise on cognition are well established; however specific exercise parameters regarding the frequency and duration of physical activity that provide optimal cognitive health have not been well defined. Here, we explore the effects of the duration of exercise and sedentary periods on long-term object location memory…

Recognition memory judgments can be influenced by a variety of signals including fluency. Here, we investigated whether the neural correlates of memory illusions (i.e., misattribution of fluency to prior study) can be modulated by fluency context. Using a masked priming/recognition memory paradigm, we found memory illusions for low confidence…

Targeted memory reactivation (TMR) during sleep improves memory consolidation. However, it is still unknown whether TMR also benefits memory in real-life conditions. We tested whether TMR during sleep enhances Dutch-German vocabulary learning when applied during multiple nights at home in an unsupervised fashion. During 3 consecutive nights, 66…

This dissertation examines the relative effects of phonetic salience and phonological prominence on speech sound processing. Three test cases, respectively, investigate the processing of consonants versus vowels by speakers of German, Hebrew, and Amharic; the processing of aspirated versus unaspirated stops by speaker of Spanish and Thai; and the…

Acronym is a very important word derivation mechanism usually applied to the new names of private or public institutions and they can be used to shorten the names of people, places, or institutions. This linguistic opportunity, which can be found in every language of the world, is quite useful in terms of its easiness and economic use of the…

Recent studies have found correlations between sentence-level tests and reading comprehension. However, the task demands of sentence-level tests are not well understood. The present study investigated syntactic knowledge as a construct by examining the convergent and discriminant validity of two sentence-level tasks, sentence comprehension and…

The present study evaluates the updating of long-term memory for duration. After learning a temporal discrimination associating one lever with a standard duration (4 sec) and another lever with both a shorter (1-sec) and a longer (16-sec) duration, rats underwent a single session for learning a new standard duration. The temporal generalization…

Ongoing discussions on the nature of storage in visual working memory have mostly focused on 2 theoretical accounts: On one hand we have a discrete-state account, postulating that information in working memory is supported with high fidelity for a limited number of discrete items by a given number of "slots," with no information being…

Prior research has shown that interruptions lead to a variety of performance costs. However, these costs are heterogenous and poorly understood. Under some circumstances, interruptions lead to large decreases in accuracy on the primary task, whereas in others task duration increases, but task accuracy is unaffected. Presently, the underlying cause…

The cognitive theory of multimedia learning postulates learning information in a dual-modality design is more effective than in a single modality, which is known as the modality effect. Research has found that the modality effect supports problem-solving learning, but not retention-based learning. This divergence in findings can be explained by…

The present study analyzed the joint predictive role of verbal working memory (WM), verbal short-term memory (STM), fluid intelligence, and intelligence mindset in reading comprehension, controlling for prior reading comprehension performance, in typically developing Spanish-speaking school-aged children. A sample of 83 children aged 9-10 years…

The brain processes underlying impairing effects of emotional arousal on associative memory were previously attributed to two dissociable routes using high-resolution fMRI of the MTL (Madan et al. 2017). Extrahippocampal MTL regions supporting associative encoding of neutral pairs suggested unitization; conversely, associative encoding of negative…

Reduced forms such as the pronoun "he" provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as "the lead singer of Coldplay." Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade-off between the informativity…