Prior familiarity has been shown to increase memory for faces, but different effects emerge depending on whether the face is experimentally or pre-experimentally familiar to the observer. Across two experiments, we compared the effect of experimental and pre-experimental familiarity on recognition and source memory. Pre-experimentally familiar faces were nameable US celebrities, and unfamiliar faces were unnamable European celebrities. Within both sets, faces could be made experimentally familiar via repetition during the learning phase (studied once or thrice). At test, all studied identities were represented by novel (i.e., not studied) photos, allowing us to test memory for the identity rather than the picture. In Experiment 1, repeated presentations of both face types increased recognition rates, but accuracy was generally higher for pre-experimentally familiar faces. Experiment 2 expanded on these findings by pairing the faces with background locations and manipulating associative strength of the face-location pairs. Although pre-experimentally familiar faces were again recognized more often, they were also more likely to be falsely labeled as "old" when paired with new background locations. These results have implications for basic and applied studies examining familiar versus unfamiliar face recognition.

The item-based directed-forgetting effect is explained as a difference in how strongly people encode remember-cued over forget-cued targets. In contrast, the production effect is typically explained as a difference in the distinctiveness of the memory of produced over unproduced targets. The procedural alignment of the two effects - directing participants to remember or forget, produce or not - coupled with their different theoretical explanations (i.e., strength vs. distinctiveness) presents an opportunity to investigate common versus differential effects of elaborative encoding. This study aims to bridge the gap between these two well-established phenomena by comparing the differences in directed forgetting and the production effect in the context of recognition. Mixed- and pure-list designs were utilized to provide an index of each of these mechanisms in both procedures. Along with a standard production effect and directed forgetting effect in the mixed-list conditions, we found evidence for strength primarily driving results in both procedures. Results are explained using a global matching model of recognition memory, MINERVA 2, by assuming varying levels of encoding strength in relation to task demands. Critically, we obtain the best fit using a strength mechanism over a combined strength and distinctiveness mechanism for our data.

Although the production effect is well-established in undergraduates, limited research has examined this effect in children. The primary goal of the current study was to replicate the production effect in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, one group studied all items silently or aloud (pure lists) and another group studied half of the items silently and said half aloud (mixed lists). At recall, the production effect was present in mixed lists but not in pure lists. The results suggest that the effect in mixed lists was due to both a benefit for produced items and a cost to silent items. Experiments 2 and 3 examined whether preschoolers were aware of the benefits of production. The results were mixed and indicate that task difficulty may impact whether production benefits memory. When the metacognitive task was easier (Experiment 3), the production effect replicated. Preschoolers' judgments indicated they believe that production leads to better memory, but they were overconfident. The current results demonstrate that (1) young children can use production to improve memory when instructed, even before they spontaneously use it, (2) they believe production can benefit memory, and (3) task difficulty may account for discrepancies in prior work examining the production effect in children.

In memory tasks, items read aloud are better remembered than their silently read counterparts. This production effect is often interpreted by assuming a distinctiveness benefit for produced items, but whether this benefit also comes at a cost remains up for debate. In recall tasks, when pure lists are used in which all items are produced or read silently, studies have shown a better recall of produced items at the last serial positions, but a lower recall at the first positions. This cost of production has been interpreted by assuming that production interferes with rehearsal. However, in recognition tasks, models typically assume that the distinctiveness benefit for produced items comes at no cost. Across four experiments, participants completed a 2AFC recognition test, an old-new recognition test or an immediate serial recall test. List length was also manipulated. Results show that although the production effect is larger at the last serial positions, the cross-over interaction between the production effect and serial position observed in recall was not present in recognition. These results suggest that task-related differences in the production effect may inform us about the modulation of basic memory processes by task demands.

Research on automatic evaluative responses to faces varying in emotional expression and ethnicity has yielded conflicting results. Some paradigms, like the Approach/Avoidance task, demonstrated interactive evaluation. In contrast, recent studies using the Evaluative Priming Task (EPT) yielded independent effects of expression and ethnicity. One key difference between these paradigms is the task relevance of the faces. In the EPT faces served solely as primes without direct relevance to the task. To examine whether increased task relevance could engender interactive processing in the EPT, we utilized a modified version of the "bona fide pipeline" EPT. In this adaptation, participants categorized the valence of target words succeeding prime faces followed by probe faces. Participants then judged whether the prime and probe faces depicted the same person, thereby adding task relevance to the prime faces. Experiment 1 revealed independent priming effects of emotion and ethnicity. Since error data and inverse efficiency scores provided evidence for an interactive evaluation, we replicated Experiment 1 using a sequential Bayes testing strategy. Experiment 2 confirmed that the effects of emotion and ethnicity remain independent, indicating that increased task relevance did not yield the integrated processing of emotion and ethnicity as initially hypothesized.

Recent work has supported the role of reasoning in third-party moral judgment of harm transgressions. In particular, reasoning may increase the weight of intention in moral judgment, especially following accidental harm, a situation that presumably requires judges to balance considerations about the outcome endured by a victim on the one hand and considerations about an agent's intention to cause harm on the other hand. Three preregistered lab-based studies aimed to test the causal contribution of reasoning to moral judgment of harm transgressions using experimental manipulations borrowed from the reasoning literature: time pressure (Experiment 1), cognitive load (Experiment 2), and priming (Experiment 3). Participants ( = 284) were presented with short fictitious scenarios in which the agent's intention toward a potential victim (harmful or neutral intent) and the action's outcome (victim's injury or no harm) were manipulated. Participants then reported their moral judgment of the agent's behavior (wrongness and deserved punishment) and their empathy toward the victim. We found that time pressure reduced judgment severity toward agents who had the intention to harm, but the reasoning manipulations overall did not impact judgment severity toward agents who harmed accidentally. We discuss why reasoning may sometimes influence how individuals account for intention in third-party moral judgment of harm transgressions.

Visual working memory (VWM), due to its temporary nature, is highly volatile. VWM encoding may be easily disrupted by cues from our visually rich media environment, such as social media logos and notification badges. Yet, to what extent these social media-related cues adversely affect our cognitive processing is not well understood. In three experiments, participants performed a change-detection task with a memory array that contained colored stimuli. Next to the memory array, social media logos with or without notification badges might appear in conjunction with the memory array in critical blocks (Experiment 1) or in critical trials (Experiment 2 and 3). The presence of social media logos with notification badges adversely affected change detection performance in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2 or 3. Overall, the findings seem to indicate that the presence of social media logos does not interfere with visual working memory performance.

While the impact of time pressure on decision-making is extensively studied, how individuals regulate their behavior under such conditions is less understood. This study addressed this gap by prompting participants to use cognitive reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy. Participants were instructed to reinterpret their emotions during the decision-making process and asked to answer within 1,000 ms. Findings revealed that cognitive reappraisal mitigated the effects of time pressure in gain-framed trials by decreasing risk aversion that is usually induced by time pressure. A post hoc moderated mediation analysis indicated that this was attributed to the dual influence of cognitive reappraisal: less emotional intensity toward options and less overall emotional reliance during the cognitive process, both modulating risky preferences. However, this modulation was not observed in loss-framed trials. These results enhance our understanding of cognitive reappraisal's role in moderating the behavioral impact of time pressure and suggest interventions to reduce affect heuristics in decision-making.

Escalation of commitment is an important decision problem that occurs across different decision contexts. Recognizing that escalation involves one's effort to achieve some form of a goal, researchers have attempted to understand escalation of commitment as a goal-pursuing activity. Prior research works have suggested that escalation situations consist of (1) an initial goal setting phase and (2) an escalation decision-making phase and have investigated how goal difficulty and goal specificity influence escalation decisions. However, they have neglected the potential role of the goal source in escalation situations. In this study, we aim to advance our understanding of escalation of commitment by examining the relationship between goal source and escalation. Specifically, by drawing on distinct characteristics of escalation situations, we conceptualize a new form of goal source, namely inherited goals, and examine its effect on escalation of commitment compared with self-set and assigned goals that are well-known goal sources in goal-setting theory (GST). We conducted two laboratory experiments and found evidence suggesting that individuals who had inherited goals (i.e., those who did not take part in initial goal setting and did not invest effort in pursuing the previous course of action) are less likely to fall into the escalation trap.

Using two executive tasks, we explored how body posture influences mind wandering, a universal internally self-generated activity. Specifically, participants were instructed to perform the Sustained Attention Response Task (SART) and the Flanker task under three postural conditions: lying supine, sitting, and standing upright. These tasks reflect the proactive and reactive modes of executive control, respectively. To measure the frequency of mind wandering, we employed the probe-caught technique, presenting prompts at irregular intervals. The results indicate that, compared to standing and sitting positions, lying supine significantly increased mind wandering, while posture had no effect on either measure of executive control. We suggest that changes in posture alter cognitive activity related to self-generated thoughts and external tasks, whereas the relationship between mind wandering and executive control requires further research.

A key finding within nudging research is the , where individuals are inclined to stay with a default option when faced with a decision, rather than exploring alternatives (e.g., a preselected job opportunity among two alternatives). Similarly, the study of framing effects delves into how the presentation and context of decisions influence choices (e.g., choosing vs. rejecting a job opportunity among two alternatives). Specifically, previous literature examining decision frames in various situations has found that these frames do not invariably complement each other; therefore, individuals' preferences vary based on the task frame. Yet, simultaneous testing of multiple nudges remains relatively unexplored in the literature. In the current study involving 1,072 participants, we examined how framing and default effects can influence decision-making in hypothetical scenarios. The decision scenarios involved two different domains-work and health. We found that framing had a strong effect on decision-making in both work and health domains, whereas default setting contributed only to a limited extent in the work domain and no effect was found in the health domain, mirroring related recent research findings. We argue for a more careful design of nudge interventions when multiple overlapping nudges are used and for a contextual approach to applying behavioral science to citizens.

Online experiments offer several advantages over traditional laboratory experiments. However, for reaction time experiments, precise stimulus presentation and response detection is crucial. The precision of online experiments could be compromised due to increased variance arising from varying hardware configurations among participants, lack of control over experimental conditions, and the absence of an examiner. In this study, we conducted an online experiment using the avatar-Simon task to investigate whether small differences in reaction times could be examined using online experiments conducted with the experimental toolkit PsyToolkit. In the avatar-Simon task, participants respond to the color of vertically presented stimuli in front of avatars by pressing a left or right button. Reactions are faster when the position of the stimulus, defined from the avatar's point of view, matches the position of the response. Compared to the previous laboratory experiment, we observed lower effect sizes and more timeouts but were able to replicate the avatar-Simon effect overall. Based on further distributional and reliability analyses, PsyToolkit appears to be suitable tool to detect behavioral effects in the range of tens of milliseconds. We discuss differences and similarities with the original laboratory study and suggest how to address potential problems associated with online experiments.

Previous work suggests that similar cognitive processes contribute to memory and comprehension. This is unsurprising as both begin with a common process: encoding. Despite this, the investigation of techniques that benefit memory and comprehension has proceeded separately. In the current study, we compared the robust memory techniques of production and drawing to a similarly effective comprehension strategy known as paraphrasing. Depending on the group, participants were asked to either engage in one of the encoding types (read aloud, draw, or paraphrase) or to silently read 20 term-definition pairs (randomly intermixed and counterbalanced). The encoding techniques of drawing and paraphrasing resulted in better performance on a multiple-choice test of concept comprehension, relative to silently reading. By contrast, reading aloud at encoding did not lead to any benefit relative to silently reading. The results suggest that techniques that invoke transformation of the to-be-remembered text into another format, be it into a picture (drawing) or personally relevant summary (paraphrasing), are particularly effective at improving comprehension. By contrast, encoding techniques that mainly provide a perceptual repetition (production and silent reading) are less effective.

Prior evidence has indicated that the act of producing a word aloud is more effortful than reading a word silently, and this effort is related to the subsequent memory advantage for produced words. In the current study, we further examined the contributions of reading effort to the overall production effect by making silent reading more effortful. To do this, participants studied words that were presented in standard lowercase font format and words that were presented in an aLtErNaTiNg CaSe font format (which should be more effortful to read). Half of the words in each font condition were read aloud, and half were read silently. Participants completed an old/new recognition test. Experiment 1 was conducted online; Experiment 2 was conducted in-lab and recorded reading times at study to confirm that alternating case font slows reading. In both experiments, we found a production effect in recognition that was uninfluenced by font type. We also found that alternating case font selectively increased recollection (but not familiarity) relative to lowercase font. Thus, the additional time to read words in a disfluent font does not appear to interact with memory benefit of producing words aloud.

The current study examined whether the benefit of mixed-list production could extend to memory for background contexts using word-background context pairs. Participants studied words presented on background images; words were read aloud or silently. In Experiment 1a, half of the studied items were tested on their studied background image and half were tested on a new image using old-new recognition. Although a production effect in word recognition was observed, context reinstatement had no effect on sensitivity and only a marginal effect on hit rates; it did not interact with production. In Experiment 1b, whether participants encoded the backgrounds and whether that encoding was affected by production was tested using separate recognition tests. A production effect was found in word recognition, but there was no effect in image recognition. Experiment 2 used a cued-recall test, with the studied background images as the cues to directly test whether associations were formed between words and backgrounds at study. A production effect was found but did not interact with the presence of cues during recall. Both the benefit of production and the benefit of context reinstatement appear to be independent of one another, with production not aiding memory for the associations between items nor the context.

Learning information may benefit from movement: Items that are spoken aloud are more accurately remembered than items that are silently read (the ). Candidate mechanisms for this phenomenon suggest that speaking may enrich or improve the feature content of memory traces, yet research suggests that prior language skill also plays a role. Recent work showed a larger production effect in bilinguals for words in their language (L2) compared to their first language (L1), potentially suggesting that bilinguals engage different or additional linguistic features when speaking L2 compared to L1 words. The current study examined whether the increased L2 production effect reduces for L2 and L1 , which may similarly engage mainly phonological features. German (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals first read (out loud or silently) and subsequently recognized German or English words or pseudowords following German or English phonology. The production effect increased for L2 compared to L1 items and for words compared to pseudowords. Modest evidence suggested L2-L1 similarity in production effect scores for pseudowords, but different L2-L1 scores for words. Integrating feature models of memory with models of bilingual language production, we propose that speaking an L2 may engage more extensive and diverse linguistic features than an L1.

Mathematical models explaining production effects assume that production leads to the encoding of additional features, such as phonological ones. This improves memory with a combination of encoding strength and feature distinctiveness, implementing aspects of propositional theories. However, it is not clear why production differs from other manipulations such as study time and spaced repetition, which are also thought to influence strength. Here we extend attentional subsetting theory and propose an explanation based on the dimensionality of feature spaces. Specifically, we suggest phonological features are drawn from a compact feature space. Deeper features are sparsely subselected from a larger subspace. Algebraic and numerical solutions shed light on several findings, including the dependency of production effects on how other list items are encoded (differing from other factors) and the production advantage even for homophones. This places production within a continuum of strength-like manipulations that differ in terms of the feature subspaces they operate upon and leads to novel predictions based on direct manipulations of feature-space properties.

The refers to the finding that words read aloud are better remembered than words read silently. This finding is typically attributed to the presence of additional sensorimotor features appended to the memory trace by the act of reading aloud, which are not present for items read silently. Supporting this perspective, the production effect tends to be larger for singing (the ) than reading aloud, possibly due to the inclusion of further sensorimotor features (e.g., more pronounced tone). However, the singing superiority effect has not always replicated. Across four experiments, we demonstrate a production effect for items read aloud but observe a singing superiority effect only when items are tested in the same color in which they were studied (with foils randomized to color). A series of meta-analytic models revealed the singing superiority effect to be smaller than previously thought and to emerge only when test items are presented in the same color in which they were studied. This outcome is inconsistent with common distinctiveness-based theoretical accounts.

There is evidence suggesting that bilingual individuals demonstrate an advantage over monolinguals in performing various tasks related to memory and executive functions. The characteristics of this bilingual advantage are not unanimously agreed upon in the literature, and some even doubt it exists. The heterogeneity of the bilingual population may explain this inconsistency. Hence, it is important to identify different subgroups of bilinguals and characterize their cognitive performance. The current study focuses on the production effect, a well-established memory phenomenon, in bilingual young adults differing in their English and Hebrew proficiency levels, and the possible balanced bilingual advantage. The aims of this study are (1) to evaluate the production effect in three groups of bilingual participants: English-dominant bilinguals, Hebrew-dominant bilinguals, and balanced bilinguals, and (2) to examine whether memory advantage depends on varying degrees of bilingualism. One hundred twenty-one bilingual young adults who speak English and Hebrew at different levels participated. All learned lists of familiar words, in English and Hebrew, half by reading aloud and half by silent reading, followed by free recall tests. As expected, a production effect (better memory for aloud words than for silent words) was found for all groups in both languages. Balanced bilinguals remembered more words than did dominant participants, demonstrating a memory advantage in both languages. These findings support the hypothesis that the presence of cognitive advantage in bilingualism depends on the acquisition of a good proficiency level in each of the languages, with direct implications for family language policy and bilingual education.