Refreshing is assumed to reactivate the contents of working memory in an attention-based way, resulting in a boost of the attended representations and hence improving their subsequent memory. Here, we examined whether the refreshing-induced memory boost is a constant or a gradual, time-dependent phenomenon. If the beneficial effect of refreshing on memory performance is due to the information being selected for refreshing (i.e., selection hypothesis), a constant memory boost is expected to occur each time an item is selected for refreshing, with better memory performance for items that are selected more often. If, however, the beneficial effect of refreshing on memory performance is due to spending time in the focus of attention during refreshing (i.e., duration hypothesis), a gradual memory boost is expected, with the size of the memory boost being a direct function of how long the item has been the object of focused attention. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we instructed and guided the use of refreshing during retention through the presentation of cues, and varied the number of refreshing steps and their duration independently. The number of refreshing steps, but not their duration, had an effect on recall, in agreement with the selection hypothesis. However, some of the results were less robust than anticipated, indicating that the effect of instructed refreshing is limited to certain task parameters.

Working memory is a cognitive system that enables the temporary retention (usually a few seconds) of a limited amount of information. However, recent evidence has posed challenges to the conventional understanding of working memory's persistence. Chen et al. (Psychological Science, 29(4), 645-655, 2018) demonstrated that participants can easily make judgments using a stimulus's identity but cannot recall from which source the information came (presented either as a written word or a color patch) just milliseconds earlier. This "Source Amnesia" carries substantial implications for working memory models but has yet to be explored within the realm of verbal information. We fill this gap by investigating the robustness and generalizability of this rapid forgetting phenomenon. We first replicate the observed effect within the visual domain (Experiment 1) and subsequently extend it to the verbal domain (Experiment 2). Finally, we test the idea that participants may instead encode a positional context (Experiment 3), in line with the Interference model (Oberauer & Lin, Psychological Review, 124(1), 21, 2017). Aligning with the work of Chen et al. (Psychological Science, 29(4), 645-655, 2018), our results consistently reveal a pronounced tendency for rapid forgetting, for both visual and verbal information regardless of whether the information is elicited for recall by format or position cues. The theoretical implications of these findings for current memory models are discussed.

Spontaneous associative processes (e.g., mind wandering, spontaneous memory recollection) are prevalent in everyday life, yet their influence on perceptual scene memory is under debate. Given that scene perception involves extraction of contextual associations, we hypothesized that associative thought would enhance scene memory by promoting encoding of contextual associations. In an online experiment (N = 75), participants viewed scenes, and following each scene either generated chained-free associations (associative processing), or, as control, listed words that begin with a specific letter (phonological processing). Scene memory was tested after an intermediate creativity task, which is also shown to rely on associative processes. Results revealed that associative thought, regardless of its conceptual (semantic) distances between responses, enhanced scene-gist memory, but hampered memory of scene details, implying that associative thought facilitates contextual encoding. In a follow-up experiment (N = 74), we found that the effect of associative thought on scene-gist memory was mediated by scene labeling. When participants were asked to explicitly label the scene before completing an associative processing or a phonological processing task, scene-gist memory was prioritized at the expense of scene details, eliminating the memory differences between tasks. These findings imply that labeling past perceived scenes, whether explicitly or implicitly during associative thought, facilitates scene-gist memory. Lastly, in both experiments, creativity was not correlated with scene memory but was positively correlated with the semantic distances between scene-based associations, extending past findings that link creativity with the breadth of associative processes. Together, these findings highlight the likely effect of post-perceptual associative processes on higher-order cognitive functions, such as memory consolidation and creative thought.

Previous studies have demonstrated that engaging in graphomotor activity for creating graphemes can enhance their subsequent visual discrimination. This suggests a positive influence of the motor system on visual learning. However, existing studies have emphasized the dominant hand, which is superiorly dexterous in fine-motor movements. This near-exclusive focus prompts the inquiry of whether the observed perceptual facilitation is a general characteristic of the motor system, or specific to pathways controlling the skilled over-trained dominant hand. Furthermore, the mechanistic underpinning of visual facilitation from graphomotor training (i.e., the individual contribution of motor activity, temporal evolution of the visual trace, variability of visual output) remain unclear. To address these questions, we assessed visual discrimination capabilities of healthy right-handed participants (N = 60) before and after graphomotor or visual training. Contrary to our initial expectation, graphomotor engagement with the non-dominant hand did not yield additional benefits to visual learning beyond those attainable through visual training alone. Moreover, graphomotor training with the non-dominant hand resulted in visual discrimination improvements comparable to those of dominant hand training, despite the inherent differences between hands in motor performance and in the amount of improvement in shape tracing throughout training. We conclude that the motor components of graphomotor activity may not be critical for visual learning of shapes through tracing activity. Instead, our results are in agreement with the symbolic theoretical account, suggesting that basic shape features required for discrimination can be acquired through visual inspection alone, providing a perspective on the improvements observed in prior studies.

The present experiments investigated how interpolated testing and postevent misinformation affected earwitness memory. We examined how the number of tests and when tests occurred affected memory for an overheard event and source monitoring. Across three experiments, participants overheard a crime (i.e., the witnessed event), heard a news report summarizing the crime (postevent information), took a cued-recall test, and lastly, took a source-monitoring test. Experiment 1 compared three groups: repeated cued-recall test, repeated listen, single cued-recall test. Participants in the interpolated test group received a test after the witnessed event and again after the postevent information. Participants in the repeated listen group heard the witnessed event, and immediately relistened to the event before being presented with the postevent information. In Experiment 2 and 3, we varied the retention intervals between the witnessed event and the postevent information in a repeated test context. Our findings suggest that when participants took a test before presentation of the postevent information, they were less accurate on a final cued-recall test of the witnessed event. Importantly, the timing of the first test in relation to the witnessed event and postevent information differentially affected memory for the witnessed event and source monitoring of event and postevent details.

A photo lineup, which consists of one suspect and several physically similar fillers, is often used by the police to test an eyewitness's memory. To optimize memory performance, how similar should the fillers be to the suspect, and how many fillers should be included in the lineup? Recent work suggests that using fillers who match the basic characteristics of the perpetrator (e.g., same age, race, and gender) but who are otherwise maximally dissimilar to the suspect optimizes discriminability. However, the optimal lineup size has been found to vary with filler similarity, with larger lineup sizes increasing or decreasing discriminability depending on whether low-similarity or high-similarity fillers were used, respectively. Because manipulating filler similarity at retrieval affects overall performance, here we investigated whether encoding manipulations that affect overall performance also affect how lineup size influences discriminability. In three experiments, we first replicated prior findings (N = 502), then reduced encoding strength by making study images blurry when low-similarity fillers were used (N = 553), and finally increased encoding strength by repeating study images when high-similarity fillers were used (N = 501). We found that whether overall performance was low or high due these encoding manipulations, discriminability still increased as a function of lineup size when low-similarity fillers were used and decreased as a function of lineup size when high-similarity fillers were used. Thus, lineup size has opposing effects on discriminability when task difficulty is manipulated at retrieval, which narrows the theoretical explanations for why that effect is observed.

Memory retrieval affects subsequent memory in both positive (e.g., the testing effect) and negative (e.g., retrieval-induced forgetting [RIF]) ways, and can be contrasted with other forms of memory modification (e.g., study-based encoding). Divided attention substantially impairs study-based encoding but has a modest effect on retrieval. What of the subsequent learning consequences of retrieval? Earlier studies indicate that certain positive effects (i.e., the testing effect) are not reduced by distraction, whereas negative effects (i.e., RIF) are eliminated. The present study assessed an indirect (positive) effect of retrieval-the forward testing effect (FTE), in which prior retrieval or retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. Two experiments examined the role of attention in both the standard FTE and the pretesting effect. In Experiment 1, participants learned three study lists through retrieval practice or restudy, followed by a fourth study list. Prior retrieval practice enhanced subsequent new learning more than restudy (i.e., the standard FTE), and to a similar degree under full attention (FA) and divided attention (DA). In Experiment 2, participants learned cue-target word pairs by either studying the pair or guessing the target when shown a cue (i.e., pretesting) followed by the correct pair. Pretesting enhanced memory more than just studying to a similar degree under FA and DA. In sum, both forms of the FTE were unaffected by distraction, indicating that these positive consequences of retrieval are not based on controlled processes but instead appear to be relatively obligatory consequences of retrieval (or retrieval attempts). These results also have relevance for specific accounts of the standard FTE and the pretesting effect.

The present experiment evaluated the effects of varying intensities of acute exercise on free-recall memory performance while controlling for potential state-dependent effects. Forty-eight young adults completed a within-subject experiment involving seven primary laboratory visits. The encoding and retrieval phases were matched or mismatched by taking place either during rest or during a less than 5-min bout of acute exercise, and at moderate or vigorous intensity. We did not find evidence that the effects of acute exercise on memory were state-dependent but instead demonstrated that memory recall was greater when memory retrieval occurred during vigorous-intensity exercise compared to rest. These findings have important implications for the strategic placement of exercise during the phases of memory (e.g., acquisition, storage, retrieval) to optimize memory performance and suggest boundary conditions of state-dependent learning. We discuss various theoretical accounts (e.g., shift in metabolic resources across brain regions) to explain these findings.

While watching someone kicking a ball, missing moments of ball contact can be incorrectly identified as seen if the event is continued in a causal manner (i.e., the ball flying off). Does event completion also occur for events of a larger scale such as having breakfast (macro-event), which consists of multiple sub-steps like toasting bread (micro-event)? We conducted two experiments to measure event completion in macro-events presenting portions of multiple micro-events. In Experiment 1, video summaries were formed with or without event boundary information where a macro-end was either present or absent. Macro-end signified an overarching goal achievement that signaled the completion of previous tasks (such as leaving the kitchen with a full breakfast plate). More completion occurred for summaries with event boundary information and macro-ends. In Experiment 2, we tested two alternative hypotheses to explore the underlying process by showing the beginnings or ends of a micro-event. While the predictive processing hypothesis suggests that event completion is based more on predicting the future states of the event based on beginning information, the backward inferences hypothesis suggests that event completion relies more on deductions formed after the fact based on event endings. Results of Experiment 2 suggest that the ends of event boundaries lead to more event completion, possibly due to their role in forming causal connectivity. These results help to further understand event completion on a macro level.

While it is well-established that authentic emotional autobiographical memories elicit physiological responses, research suggests that this elicitation can also occur for fabricated autobiographical memories. Yet challenges arise from awareness discrepancies when considering two research fields: Participants in memory studies may be unaware of producing false memories, while liars are aware of fabricating false events. Hence, in two experiments, we compared the psychophysiological pattern of true autobiographical memories with fabricated memory narratives. Using noninvasive biometric devices to measure heart rate (HR) and skin conductance level (SCL), participants were tasked with recalling both true and fabricated negative and neutral autobiographical experiences in a written (Experiment 1) and oral (Experiment 2) way. While in Experiment 1, no statistically significant differences were detected in participants' physiological responses across different recall types, in Experiment 2 we found higher HR responses during the recollection of true negative memories as compared with true neutral and fabricated memory accounts. These latter findings confirm that negative autobiographical memories might be associated with increased HR responses when they are recalled verbally. Furthermore, they suggest that people's awareness of memory authenticity (i.e., recalling true versus fabricated events) may be linked to corresponding physiological reactions linked to specific recollections.

A fundamental question in memory research has long been the interplay between briefly maintaining information in working memory (WM) and its enduring retention in long-term memory (LTM). Much of the research has explored how WM processes influence the formation of LTM and, in turn, how stored LTM can either support or disrupt WM performance. This Special Issue of Memory & Cognition brings together cutting-edge research that delves into this relationship, showcasing studies that reveal the latest advances in the field. Additionally, it includes articles offering conceptual and theoretical insights to better understand the dynamic interaction between WM and LTM. The 25 articles presented here emphasize the ways in which information is transferred from WM to more durable representations in LTM, as well as how WM flexibly draws on LTM to overcome its limited capacity. In many ways, the quality and quantity of contributions to this Special Issue highlight the importance of jointly studying WM and LTM, inspiring future work to challenge pre-existing conceptions and stimulate new directions in the field of memory.

Sequential behaviour is underpinned by the selection and inhibition of movement at appropriate points in space and time. Sequences embedded among movement patterns must be learnt, yet the contribution of response selection and inhibition to the acquisition of motor sequences remains poorly understood. We addressed this issue by overlaying the serial reaction time task (SRTT) with subliminal masked primes that differentially weighed response tendencies. In Experiment 1, twenty-four healthy young adults, and in Experiment 2, thirty-six participants, performed the SRTT with congruent (same position), incongruent (different position), or neutral (no prime) subliminal masked primes. Each condition featured an embedded eight-digit (Experiment 1) or ten-digit (Experiment 2) second-order sequence, with conditions presented in counterbalanced order during a single session. Sequence specific learning was observed under neutral and congruent prime conditions. Independent of sequence awareness, congruent primes reduced initial response latency and led to greater sequence specific learning compared with neutral primes. However, incongruent primes appeared to attenuate learning (Experiment 1). These results demonstrate that prime congruency modulates sequence specific learning below the threshold of conscious awareness. Congruent primes may elevate the salience of stimulus-response compounds and accentuate learning, but at the cost of increased awareness. Incongruent primes, and the induction of response conflict, attenuate sequence specific learning (Experiment 1) and may prevent the formation of cross-temporal contingencies necessary for implicit motor sequence learning.

The present study investigated the effects of long-term knowledge on backward masking interference in visual working memory (VWM) by varying the similarity of mask stimuli along categorical dimensions. To-be-remembered items and masks were taken from categories controlled for perceptual distinctiveness and distinctiveness in kinds (e.g., there are many kinds of cars and few kinds of coffee mugs). Participants completed a change-detection task in which the memory array consisted of exemplars from either a similar or distinctive category, followed by a mask array of items from the same category (conceptually similar versus conceptually distinct categories), a different category, or no mask. The results over two experiments showed greater interference from conceptually similar masks as compared with the other conditions across stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions, suggesting masking with conceptually similar categories leads to more interference even when masks are shown well after the stimulus. These results have important implications for both the nature and time course of long-term conceptual knowledge influencing VWM, particularly when using complex real-world objects.

A word's orthographic neighborhood is the set of words that differ from the target word by one letter. Both Roodenrys (2009) and Robert et al. (Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44, 119-125, 2015) posit that orthographic neighbors are activated when the target word is encountered in tasks such as simple and complex span. The two accounts differ in that the former predicts a beneficial effect of this activation, because it produces feedback activation that helps redintegrate the target word, whereas the latter predicts a detrimental effect, because the need to overcome the greater interference from the larger number of higher-frequency items reduces the processing resources available. Four experiments assess the predictions of these two accounts. Experiments 1 and 2 found a beneficial effect of having a higher- compared with a lower-frequency neighborhood in both a simple and a complex span task. Experiments 3 and 4 found no detrimental effect of having one or more neighbors with higher frequency than the target in both a simple and complex span task. Implications for the two theories are discussed.

Source monitoring involves attributing previous experiences (e.g., studied words as items) to their origins (e.g., screen positions as sources). The present study aimed toward a better understanding of temporal aspects of item and source processing. Participants made source decisions for recognized items either in succession (i.e., the standard format) or in separate test blocks providing independent measures of item and source decision speed. Comparable speeds of item and source decision across the test formats would suggest a full separation between item and source processing, whereas different speeds would imply their (partial) temporal overlap. To test these alternatives, we used the drift rate parameter of the diffusion model (Ratcliff, Psychological Review, 85, 59-108, 1978). We examined whether the drift rates, together with the other parameters, assessed separately for the item and source decision varied as a function of the test format. Threshold separation and nondecision time differed between the test formats, but item and source decision speeds represented by drift rates did not change significantly. Thus, despite facilitation on the source decision when the item decision was immediately followed by a test for source memory than when item and source were tested in separate blocks, findings did not suggest that source information already begins accumulating in the item test in the standard format. We discuss the temporal sequence of item and source processing in light of different assumptions about the contribution of familiarity and recollection.

Adult humans experience agency when their action causes certain events (sense of agency). Moreover, they can later remember what these events were (memory). Here, we investigate how the relationship between actions and events shapes agency experience and memory for the corresponding events. Participants performed actions that produced stimuli that were either congruent or incongruent to the action while memory of these stimuli was probed in a recognition test. Additionally, predictability of the effect was manipulated in Experiment 1 by using either randomly interleaved or blocked ordering of action-congruent and action-incongruent events. In Experiment 2, the size of the action space was manipulated by allowing participants to choose between three or six possible responses. The results indicated a heightened sense of agency following congruent compared to incongruent trials, with this effect being increased given a larger available action space, as well as a greater sense of agency given higher predictability of the effect. Recognition memory was better for stimuli presented in congruent compared to incongruent trials, with no discernible effects of effect predictability or the size of the action space. The results point towards a joint influence of predictive and postdictive processes on agency experience and suggest a link between control and memory. The partial dissociation of influences on agency experience and memory cast doubt on a mediating role of agency experience on the relationship between action-effect congruency and memory. Theoretical accounts for this relationship are discussed.

We investigated how self-determined (free) versus imposed (forced) choices influence task performance. To this end, we examined how changes in perceptual and central decision-processing difficulties affect task performance in an environment where free-choice and forced-choice tasks were intermixed. In Experiments 1 (N = 43) and 2 (N = 42), perceptual processing difficulty was varied by altering colored dot proportions (easy vs. hard color discrimination task). In Experiment 3 (N = 58), decision-processing difficulty was adjusted by changing the rotation degree of letters (easy vs. hard letter rotation task). Across all experiments, both free-choice and forced-choice performance were more impaired with harder stimuli, but this effect was generally less pronounced in freely chosen tasks. Specifically, this was evident from significant interactions between processing mode (free vs. forced) and difficulty (easy vs. hard) in the mean reaction times (RTs) for the tasks with the difficulty manipulation. Thus, processing in free-choice tasks is generally less affected by environmental changes (i.e., variation in information difficulties). We discuss how the benefit of self-determined choices over imposed choices can be explained by motivational and performance-optimization accounts, while also considering the finding that participants adjusted their task choices toward tasks with easier stimuli (i.e., significant main effect of task difficulty on choosing the task with the difficulty manipulation). Specifically, we discuss how having control over task choices might lead to more stable information processing and allow people to choose more difficult tasks when this increased difficulty has a relatively small impact on their performance.

Lately, there has been a growing fascination with blending research on visualizing data and understanding how our basic visual perception works. Taking this path, this research delved into the connection between ensemble perception, which involves quickly and accurately grasping essential information from sets of visually similar objects, and how we process scatterplots. Across two experiments, we aimed to answer a couple of connected questions. First, we investigated whether having an outlier in a scatterplot affects how people draw trend-line estimates. Second, we explored whether what we are familiar with and the presence of outliers that match the trend affect how we draw trend-line estimates in scatterplots. In both experiments, we showed participants scatterplots for a short time, manipulating whether there were outliers or not. Then, using a computer mouse, participants drew their trend-line estimates. By comparing what they drew with possible trend-line solutions, we discovered that when there is no context, the outlier and the other points in a scatterplot are seen as equally important in drawing the trend-line estimate. But when the scatterplot depicted a familiar context and the outlier fitted the trend, people tended to give more weight to those outlier points in their drawings. This suggested that what we already believe can sway how we draw trend-line estimates even from quickly shown scatterplots.

Visual working memory (VWM) plays a crucial role in temporarily storing and processing visual information, but the nature of stored representations and their interaction with new inputs has long been unclear. The pointer system refers to how VWM links new sensory inputs to stored information using specific cues. This study aimed to investigate whether the pointer system is based on spatial, feature-based, or object-based cues by employing the repetition benefit effect, where memory performance improves with repeated memory items. Across three experiments, we manipulated spatial positions, shapes, and colors as pointer cues to determine how these features affect VWM consolidation and updating. The results showed that while spatial location serves as a strong pointer cue, shape and color features can also effectively reestablish object correspondence in VWM. These findings support the view that the pointer system in VWM is flexible and object-based, utilizing various feature cues to maintain memory continuity. This study provides new insights into how VWM connects new inputs with stored information through the pointer system.

When faced with requests for information ("Where did you go last night?"), why do speakers make non-sentential replies ("The movies") rather than full sentence replies ("I went to the movies")? We examine the role that pragmatic factors (politeness and formality) and memory factors (the speaker's ability to retrieve the answer to the question) play in determining whether speakers generate a non-sentential reply. Participants answered a series of questions about their lives. Pragmatic factors affected the participants' responses. Speakers instructed to be polite or formal made fewer non-sentential replies than speakers who did not receive specific instructions. Memory retrieval (indexed both by the time required for the participant to begin their response and by the presence of disfluencies at the beginning of the response) did not have a straightforward relationship to the production of non-sentential replies. The effect of response latency and disfluencies depended on whether the participants were told to be polite or formal (or if they were given no instruction at all).

Remembering specific memories with precision relies on the differentiation of similar memory contents - a process commonly referred to as pattern separation and behaviorally operationalized as lure discrimination in the mnemonic similarity task. Although pattern separation is typically investigated in the context of long-term memory (LTM), recent research extends these findings to short-term memory (STM) within a mixture model framework, emphasizing the distinction between memory quality and quantity. According to this framework, pattern separation is associated with memory precision across STM and LTM, regardless of the overall memory likelihood. However, these associations among memory quality measures may persist without the mixture model assumption. In an alternative model, a unitary memory strength measure quantified as a discrimination score (d') may also capture the association between pattern separation and memory quality, as pattern separation has been previously linked with strength-based memory performance. We tested these possibilities based on individual differences among 132 participants who underwent tasks measuring mnemonic pattern separation and STM/LTM quality. We found that behavioral estimates of pattern separation are significantly correlated with STM and LTM precision, irrespective of the likelihood of STM/LTM recall success. However, these associations are absent when considering the correlation between pattern separation and memory strength under a unitary model framework. By leveraging individual differences to constrain our understanding of cognitive models, our data unravel the intricate relationship between pattern separation and memory quality across timescales. These findings may therefore contribute to identifying sensitive behavioral measures for detecting subtle memory deficits in older adults or clinical populations.

While humans often encode and retrieve memories in groups, the bulk of our knowledge of human memory comes from paradigms with individuals in isolation. The primary phenomenon of interest within the relatively new field of collaborative memory is collaborative inhibition: the tendency for collaborative groups to underperform in free recall tasks compared with noncollaborative groups of the same size. This effect has been found in a variety of materials and group compositions. However, most research in this field is led by verbal conceptual theories without guidance from formal computational models. We present a framework to scale the Search of Associative Memory model (SAM) to collaborative free recall paradigms with multiple models working together. Multiple SAM models recalling together naturally produce collaborative inhibition when the group members use recalls by the group as cues to retrieve from memory, strongly supporting the "retrieval disruption" hypothesis. This work shows that SAM can act as a unified theory to explain both individual and collaborative memory effects and offers a framework for future predictions of scaling to increased group sizes, shared knowledge, and factors facilitating the spread of false memories in groups.

Two experiments investigated proactive facilitation (PF) or proactive interference (PI) in the recall of recently learned targets, under conditions of assessing the detection and recollection of target changes across two learning phases (with A-B/A-D word pairs). Some changes established meaningful connections across the phases; others did not. Task instructions on the subsequent cued-recall test (Experiment 1) or during Phase 2 study (Experiment 2) guided participants (university students) to monitor and report the changes. Accuracy in cued recall conditionalized on measures of change awareness replicated previous findings in establishing conditions for PF and PI. However, PF was much reduced for unconnected materials. Moreover, when change recollection failed, PI occurred even under conditions of meaningful connections (Experiment 1). Discussion emphasizes this interdependence of meaningfulness of connections and change awareness in influencing whether and how memory for earlier events affects memory for more recent ones.

Visual working memory is thought to have a fixed capacity limit. However, recent evidence suggests that a greater number of real-world objects than simple features (i.e., colors) can be maintained, an effect termed the object benefit. Here, we examined whether this object benefit in visual working memory is due to qualitatively different memory processes employed for meaningful stimuli compared to simple features. In online samples of young adults, real-world objects were better remembered than colors, had higher measures of recollection, and showed a greater proportion of high-confidence responses (Exp. 1). Objects were also remembered better than their scrambled counterparts (Exp. 2), suggesting that this benefit is related to semantic information, rather than visual complexity. Critically, the specific objects that were likely to be remembered with high confidence were highly correlated across experiments, consistent with the idea that some objects are more memorable than others. Visual working memory performance for the least-memorable objects was worse than that of colors and scrambled objects. These findings suggest that real-world objects give rise to recollective, or at least high-confidence, responses at retrieval that may depend on activation of semantic features, but that this effect is limited to certain objects.

Transitive inference (TI), referring to one's ability to learn that if A > B and B > C, one can infer that A > C, is a form of serial learning that has been tested using a variety of experimental protocols. An element of most of these protocols is the presentation of some form of visual corrective feedback to help inform naïve participants about the nature of the task. Therefore, corrective feedback is often used as a critical tool for experimental TI. To further explore this tool, we presented varying forms/presence of visual feedback during TI performance: corrective, none, and ambiguous. Of the three conditions, presentation of the ambiguous feedback yielded the clearest disruption of TI performance, obvious in measurements of both response accuracy and reaction times. Participants appears to remain engaged with feedback was withheld entirely, but to disengage when presented with ambiguous feedback. Therefore, the choice regarding the form of feedback provided during testing may be critical for information processing of inferences.

The episodic flanker task is an episodic version of the Eriksen and Eriksen (Perception & Psychophysics, 16 (1), 143-149, 1974) perceptual flanker task, showing the same compatibility and distance effects. Subjects are presented with a list followed by a probe display in which one item is cued. The task, to indicate whether the probed letter appeared in the same position in the memory list, requires focusing attention on a single item in memory. The probe display contains flanking items to be ignored. They are same as the memory list or different. Same flankers are compatible with "yes" responses and incompatible with "no" responses. Different flankers are incompatible with "yes" responses and compatible with "no" responses. Previously, we presented multiple flankers in the probe, allowing a global matching strategy. Here, we report two episodic flanker experiments with just one flanker in the probe to encourage focusing sharply on the target. We found flanker compatibility effects in both experiments when a single flanker appeared immediately adjacent to the target. Experiment 2 varied the distance between the flanker and the target in the probe and the memory list and found the compatibility effect in response time only when the flanker was immediately adjacent to the target in both the probe and the memory list. The effect in accuracy also appeared when the flanker was two positions away in both the probe and the memory list. These results show that attention is focused sharply on elements of a memory structure during retrieval, suggesting that memory retrieval is perceptual attention turned inward.

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are designed to reveal processes of memory monitoring but recent research has shown that JOLs can also have reactive effects on memory performance. A recently proposed account for JOL reactivity is based on the item-specific/relational framework, a general account of memory encoding that has been applied to a wide range of memory phenomena. Importantly, the effects of these phenomena on free recall performance are generally moderated by list composition: the effects are stronger in mixed than pure list manipulations - that is, these phenomena exhibit design effects. Applied to JOL reactivity, the item-specific/relational account likewise predicts design effects. Specifically, the account predicts that JOL reactivity should be more positive in mixed compared to pure lists. In three experiments, judgment condition (JOL vs. no JOL) and list type (mixed vs. pure) were manipulated and memory assessed with free recall. As hypothesized, JOL reactivity was consistently more positive in mixed than pure lists, a result found with related word pairs (Experiment 1), unrelated word pairs (Experiment 2), and lists of single words (Experiment 3). Overall, JOL reactivity demonstrates design effects, a result which provides support for the item-specific/relational account of JOL reactivity.

The numerical Stroop task involves presenting participants with two digits that differ in physical size and numerical value and asking them to report which digit had the larger size or value while ignoring the other dimension. Previous studies show that participants have difficulty ignoring the irrelevant dimension and thus have implications on the automaticity of numerical processing. The present study investigates the automatic influence of numerical value on numerosity processing in a novel Stroop-like task. In two experiments, participants were presented with digits made of colored stripes and asked to identify the number of different colors. In both experiments, interference and facilitation effects were found, supporting the automaticity of symbolic number processing and its influence on numerosity processing. These findings expand upon previous research on numerical as well as counting Stroop tasks, and have potential implications for studying interference and basic numerical processing in children and clinical populations.

Casasanto (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138, 351-367, 2009) conceptualised the body-specificity hypothesis by empirically finding that right-handed people tend to associate a positive valence with the right side and a negative valence with the left side, whilst left-handed people tend to associate a positive valence with the left side and negative valence with the right side. Thus, this was the first paper that showed a body-specific space-valence mapping. These highly influential findings led to a substantial body of research and follow-up studies, which could confirm the original findings on a conceptual level. However, direct replications of the original study are scarce. Against this backdrop and given the replication crisis in psychology, we conducted a direct replication of Casasanto's original study with 2,222 participants from 12 countries to examine the aforementioned effects in general and also in a cross-cultural comparison. Our results support Casasanto's findings that right-handed people associate the right side with positivity and the left side with negativity and vice versa for left-handers.