Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 485-492 Abstract “Induction refers to the process in which people generalize their previous experience when making uncertain inferences about the environment that go beyond direct experience. Here we show that interim tests strongly enhance inductive learning. Participants studied the painting styles of eight famous artists across four lists, each comprising paintings by one pair of artists. In an interim test group participants’ induction was tested after each list. In two control groups participants solved math problems (interim math group) or studied additional new paintings (interim study group)… Read More
Generating lies produces lower memory predictions and higher memory performance than telling the truth: Evidence for a metacognitive illusion
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 465-484 Abstract “Manipulations that induce disfluency during encoding generally produce lower memory predictions for the disfluent condition than for the fluent condition. Similar to other manipulations of disfluency, generating lies takes longer and requires more mental effort than does telling the truth; hence, a manipulation of lie generation might produce patterns similar to other types of fluency for memory predictions. The current study systematically investigates the effect of a lie-generation manipulation on both actual and predicted memory performance. In a series of experiments, participants told the truth… Read More
Neural bases of automaticity
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 440-464 Abstract “Automaticity allows us to perform tasks in a fast, efficient, and effortless manner after sufficient practice. Theories of automaticity propose that across practice processing transitions from being controlled by working memory to being controlled by long-term memory retrieval. Recent event-related potential (ERP) studies have sought to test this prediction, however, these experiments did not use the canonical paradigms used to study automaticity. Specifically, automaticity is typically studied using practice regimes with consistent mapping between targets and distractors and spaced practice with individual targets, features that… Read More
Individual variability in the semantic processing of English compound words
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 421-439 Abstract “Semantic transparency effects during compound word recognition provide critical insight into the organization of semantic knowledge and the nature of semantic processing. The past 25 years of psycholinguistic research on compound semantic transparency has produced discrepant effects, leaving the existence and nature of its influence unresolved. In the present study, we examined the influence of semantic transparency and individual reading experience on eye-movement behavior during sentence reading. Eye-movement data were collected from 138 non–college-bound 16- to 26-year-old speakers of English in a sentence-reading task representing… Read More
Individual differences in verbal working memory underlie a tradeoff between semantic and structural processing difficulty during language comprehension: An ERP investigation
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 406-420 Abstract “This study investigated the processes reflected in the widely observed N400 and P600 event-related potential (ERP) effects and tested the hypothesis that the N400 and P600 effects are functionally linked in a tradeoff relationship, constrained in part by individual differences in cognitive ability. Sixty participants read sentences, and ERP effects of semantic anomaly, relative to plausible words, were calculated for each participant. Results suggested qualitatively different ERP patterns across participants: Some individuals generated N400-dominated effects, whereas others generated P600-dominated effects, for the same stimuli. To… Read More
Embodied cognition: Is activation of the motor cortex essential for understanding action verbs?
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 335-370 Abstract “In 8 experiments using language processing tasks ranging from lexical decision to sensibility judgment, participants made hand or foot responses after reading hand- or foot-associated words such as action verbs. In general, response time (RT) tended to be faster when the hand- versus foot-associated word was compatible with the limb that was required to respond (e.g., hand response to a hand-associated word) than when it was incompatible (e.g., foot response to a hand-associated word). To see whether this compatibility effect reflects differential hand- versus foot-specific… Read More
Can the first letter advantage be shaped by script-specific characteristics?
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 493-500 Abstract “We examined whether the first letter advantage that has been reported in the Roman script disappears, or even reverses, depending on the characteristics of the orthography. We chose Thai because it has several “nonaligned” vowels that are written prior to the consonant but phonologically follow it in speech (e.g., แฟน<ε:fn> is spoken as /fɛ:n/) whereas other “aligned” vowels are written and spoken in a corresponding order, as occurs in English (e.g., ฟาก is spoken as /fa:k/). We employed the forced choice decision paradigm of Adelman,… Read More
Primacy and recency effects for taste
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 399-405 Abstract “Historically, much of what we know about human memory has been discovered in experiments using visual and verbal stimuli. In two experiments, participants demonstrated reliably high recognition for nonverbal liquids. In Experiment 1, participants showed high accuracy for recognizing tastes (bitter, salty, sour, sweet) over a 30-s delay in a recognition task, even when the probe stimulus was only a different concentration within the same taste. In Experiment 2, participants tasted three liquids and showed both primacy and recency effects in a serial-position recognition task… Read More
Attending globally or locally: Incidental learning of optimal visual attention allocation
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 387-398 Abstract “Attention allocation determines the information that is encoded into memory. Can participants learn to optimally allocate attention based on what types of information are most likely to change? The current study examined whether participants could incidentally learn that changes to either high spatial frequency (HSF) or low spatial frequency (LSF) Gabor patches were more probable and to use this incidentally learned probability information to bias attention during encoding. Participants detected changes in orientation in arrays of 6 Gabor patches: 3 HSF and 3 LSF. For… Read More
What are the costs of degraded parafoveal previews during silent reading?
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 371-386 Abstract “It has been suggested that the preview benefit effect is actually a combination of preview benefit and preview costs. Marx et al. (2015) proposed that visually degrading the parafoveal preview reduces the costs associated with traditional parafoveal letter masks used in the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), thus leading to a more neutral baseline. We report 2 experiments of skilled adults reading silently. In Experiment 1, we found no compelling evidence that degraded previews reduced processing costs associated with traditional letter masks. Moreover, participants were highly… Read More