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Growth mindset, the belief that personal attributes such as intelligence are malleable, has previously been related to more effort investment. Here, we investigated how undergraduates' mindset (N = 114) relates to the choice to invest effort during an arithmetic task, indexed by whether they make low vs. high effort-related choices. Social cognitive theory suggests that past performance experiences (mastery vs. failure) and physiological state are important sources for competence self-evaluations. Therefore, in addition to mindset, we also investigated how effort-related choices are influenced more dynamically, by failures and physiological responses during the task. Growth mindset and physiological effort mobilization did not predict effort-related choices but making mistakes did predict lower effort choices in the subsequent round. This study further supports the importance of mastery experiences for effort investment and provides a novel approach for integrating different levels of influence on effort-related choices during an educationally-relevant task.

Emotional memory can persist strikingly long, but it is believed that not all its elements are protected against the fading effects of time. So far, studies of emotional episodic memory have mostly investigated retention up to 24h post-encoding, and revealed that central emotional features (items) are usually strengthened, while contextual binding of the event is reduced. However, even though it is known for neutral memories that central versus contextual elements evolve differently with longer passage of time, the time-dependent evolution of emotional memories remains unclear. Hypothetically, compared to neutral memories, emotional item memory becomes increasingly stronger, accompanied by accelerated decay of – already fragile – links with their original encoding contexts, resulting in progressive reductions in contextual dependency. Here, we tested these predictions in a large-scale study. Participants encoded emotional and neutral episodes, and were assessed 30 minutes (N = 40), one day (N = 40), one week (N = 39), or two weeks (N = 39) later on item memory, contextual dependency, and subjective quality of memory. The results show that, with the passage of time, emotional memories were indeed characterized by increasingly stronger item memory and weaker contextual dependency. Interestingly, analyses of the subjective quality of memories revealed that stronger memory for emotional items with time was expressed in familiarity, whereas increasingly smaller contextual dependency for emotional episodes was reflected in recollection. Together, these findings uncover the time-dependent transformation of emotional episodic memories, thereby shedding light on the ways healthy and maladaptive human memories may develop.

Background: Most of the literature on the relation between mindset and effort depends on subjective self-reports, which may not reliably capture the actual investment of effort. In the current study we (1) operationalized mental effort as the chosen and executed difficulty level in a self-adapted arithmetic task, and (2) combined variable-oriented and person-oriented analytic approaches, with the latter allowing us to explore qualitatively different profiles of effort investment. Methods: First-year Dutch high-school students (n = 299; aged 11–14 yrs) chose difficulty levels of arithmetic problems in 20 rounds. Linear Mixed Modeling (variable-oriented approach) and Latent-Profile Analysis (person-oriented approach) were used and associations with mindset, errors, gender, and school achievement (standardized arithmetic test, and math grades) were explored. Results: For male students, mindset affected their choices independently of errors, while for female students, mindset only played a role when they experienced the setback of errors. Only for males, effort mediated the relation between mindset and standardized arithmetic scores. Additionally, we identified five effort profiles: (1) Avoiders, (2) Exploring challengers, (3) Challengers, (4) Explorers and (5) Steady. Two profiles were more growth-oriented (2 and 3), and two more fixed-oriented (1 and 5). Conclusion: This study adds to the literature by demonstrating a gender-moderated relation between mindset and an objective measure of effort, but also important nuances as indicated by individual differences in effort strategies.

BACKGROUND: Recently, we showed that twice weekly sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) for depression lead to better and faster treatment outcomes compared to once weekly sessions (Bruijniks et al., 2020). The present study investigated which pathways of change may account for the effects of different session frequencies.METHOD: The sample consisted of 200 patients who were randomized to CBT weekly, CBT twice weekly, IPT weekly, or IPT twice weekly. Outcome and therapy processes were measured at baseline, two weeks and monthly up to month 6 after the start of treatment. Latent change score models investigated temporal relations between change in therapy processes and change in depression and tested whether change in the therapy processes mediated the effect of session frequency on change in depression.RESULTS: IPT skills mediated the relation between session frequency and change in depression. A decrease in depression was related to subsequent improvement in CBT skills and subsequent decrease in motivation for therapy.CONCLUSION: The development of IPT skills may explain why a twice weekly higher session frequency is more effective in reducing depression compared to a once-weekly session frequency. Future studies should disentangle the causal effects of therapy process change throughout the course of therapy.

The notion that the brain achieves visual word recognition by encoding the relative positions of letters with open-bigram representations (e.g., ‘h-e’, ‘h-r’ and ‘e-r’ driving recognition of ‘her’) has been successful in accounting for many behaviors and phenomena. However, one characteristic of open-bigrams has remained unexplored: How is the activation of a bigram modulated by the distance between its constituents in the visual field? On the one hand, contiguous letters (e.g., ‘at’ in ‘father’) may allow for a clearer percept of the bigram. On the other hand, an increasing distance between letters (e.g., ‘ae’ in ‘father’) should create more certainty about their relative positions, which is precisely what the bigram is meant to convey. This matter was investigated with two experiments in which participants indicated whether target pairs of letters occurred in random letter strings. They were instructed that letter order mattered (i.e., ‘a-b’ does not occur in ‘kbac’), while letter contiguity did not (i.e., ‘a-b’ occurs in ‘akcb’). Controlling for crowding and eccentricity, bigrams were recognized faster upon decreasing the letter distance. However, when switching the target letter order (meaning the string should be met by a ‘no’ response), shorter letter distances yielded slower responses and more false positives. Neither relative position-coding models nor absolute position-coding models accommodate both these patterns at once. We discuss how a complete account of our effects may instead combine elements from both model types.

Contains fulltext : 236748.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Objectives: The goal of the present study was to identify the role of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) in the detection and later processing of novelty. Methods: Twenty-one epilepsy patients with unilateral MTL resection (10 left-sided; 11 right-sided) and 26 matched healthy controls performed an adapted visual novelty oddball task. In this task two streams of stimuli were presented on the left and right of fixation while the patients’ electroencephalogram was measured. The participants had to respond to infrequent target stimuli, while ignoring frequent standard, and infrequent novel stimuli that were presented to the left or right, appearing either contra- or ipsilateral to the patients’ resections. Results: Novelty detection, as indexed by the N2 ERP component elicited by novels, was reduced by the MTL resections, as evidenced by a smaller N2 for patients than healthy controls. Later processing of novels, as indexed by the novelty P3 ERP component, was reduced for novels presented contra- versus ipsilateral to the resected side. Moreover, at a frontal electrode site, the N2-P3 complex showed reduced novelty processing in patients with MTL resections compared to healthy controls. The ERP differences were specific for the novel stimuli, as target processing, as indexed by the P3b, was unaffected in the patients: No P3b differences were found between targets presented ipsi- or contralaterally to the resected side, nor between patients and healthy controls. Conclusions: The current results suggest that MTL structures play a role in novelty processing. In contrast, target processing was unaffected by MTL resections. 11 p.

During reading, word recognition speed is influenced by the amount of orthographic overlap with surrounding words. The nature of this phenomenon is not understood: some theories attribute it to low-level visual operations (i.e., parafoveal feature detectors influencing foveal letter detectors), whereas other theories assume that orthographic processing (i.e., letter position coding and word activation) occurs across multiple words in parallel. To arbitrate between these theories, we used electroencephalography to reveal the time course of orthographic spatial integration in a lexical decision task. Foveal target words were flanked on each side by parafoveal words, manipulated across three conditions: repetition flankers (e.g. rock rock rock), unrelated flankers (step rock step) and a no-flanker condition. Linear mixed-effect models were constructed to analyze EEG data on a trial-by-trial basis. Word recognition was worse in the unrelated flanker condition than in the repetition and no-flanker conditions. This behavioral pattern was accompanied by increased negativity in the N250 and N400 windows, associated with the activation of sub-lexical and lexico-semantic representations, respectively. Crucially, the absence of effects prior to 200 ms post-stimulus onset provides evidence against the involvement of low-level visual processes. We conclude that orthographic spatial integration is driven by parallel processing of multiple words, which leads to the activation of a larger set of sub-lexical nodes and more difficult processing at the lexical level when those words are orthographically unrelated., Highlights • Words are recognized faster when they share many letters with surrounding words. • EEG measurements suggest that this effect unfolds 200 ms after stimulus onset. • The locus of effects contradicts the involvement of low-level visual processing. • Instead, the phenomenon appears to be driven by parallel orthographic processing.

International audience; When reading, orthographic information is extracted not only from the word the reader is looking at, but also from adjacent words in the parafovea. Here we examined, using the recently introduced OB1-reader computational model, how orthographic information can be processed in parallel across multiple words and how orthographic information can be integrated across time and space. Although OB1-reader is a model of text reading, here we used it to simulate single-word recognition experiments in which parallel processing has been shown to play a role by manipulating the surrounding context in flanker and priming paradigms. In flanker paradigms, observers recognize a central word flanked by other letter strings located left and right of the target and separated from the target by a space. The model successfully accounts for the finding that such flankers can aid word recognition when they contain bigrams of the target word, independent of where those flankers are in the visual field. In priming experiments, in which the target word is preceded by a masked prime, the model accounts for the finding that priming occurs independent of whether the prime and target word are in the same location or not. Crucial to these successes is the key role that spatial attention plays within OB1-reader, as it allows the model to receive visual input from multiple locations in parallel, while limiting the kinds of errors that can potentially occur under such spatial pooling of orthographic information.

Rich contextual and semantic information can be extracted from only a brief presentation of a natural scene. This is presumed to be activated quickly enough to guide initial eye movements into a scene. However, early, short-latency eye movements in natural scenes have been shown to be dependent on the salience distribution across the image (Anderson, Ort, Kruijne, Meeter, & Donk, 2015). In the present work, we manipulated the salience distribution across a natural scene by changing the global contrast. We showed participants a brief real or nonsense preview of the scene and examined the time-course of eye movement guidance. A real preview decreased the latency and increased the amplitude of initial saccades into the image, suggesting that the preview allowed observers to obtain additional contextual information that would otherwise not be available. However, the preview did not completely override the initial tendency for short-latency saccades to be guided by the underlying salience distribution of the image. We discuss these findings in the context of oculomotor selection based on the integration of contextual information and low-level features in a natural scene.

In a warned reaction time task, the warning stimulus (S1) initiates a process of temporal preparation, which promotes a speeded response to the impending target stimulus (S2). According to the multiple trace theory of temporal preparation (MTP), participants learn the timing of S2 by storing a memory trace on each trial, which contains a temporal profile of the events on that trial. On each new trial, S1 serves as a retrieval cue that implicitly and associatively activates memory traces created on earlier trials, which jointly drive temporal preparation for S2. The idea that S1 assumes this role as a retrieval cue was tested across eight experiments, in which two different S1s were associated with two different distributions of S1-S2 intervals: one with predominantly short and one with predominantly long intervals. Experiments differed regarding the S1 features that made up a pair, ranging from highly distinct (e.g., tone and flash) to more similar (e.g., red and green flash) and verbal (i.e., “short” vs “long”). Exclusively for pairs of highly distinct S1s, the results showed that the S1 cue modified temporal preparation, even in participants who showed no awareness of the contingency. This cueing effect persisted in a subsequent transfer phase, in which the contingency between S1 and the timing of S2 was broken – a fact participants were informed of in advance. Together, these findings support the role of S1 as an implicit retrieval cue, consistent with MTP.

Although many of our perceptual biases stem from long-term, repeated exposure, current theories of visual search assume a central role for visual working memory (VWM) in guiding attention to target information. Crucially, whether a VWM representation guides attention depends on the relative priority that the memory has within VWM. Here, in a combined visual search/VWM task, we used attentional guidance by irrelevant memories to measure how long a target representation remains prioritized in VWM when observers repeatedly search for the same target. Irrelevant memories started guiding attention already when the target was repeated once, indicating that the target representation rapidly lost priority within VWM as it moved to long-term memory. By showing that training can lead to interference from irrelevant memories, the findings resolve a long-standing paradox on why VWM appears central to, yet at the same time not sufficient nor necessary for attentional guidance.

Visual attention is strongly affected by the past: both by recent experience and by long-term regularities in the environment that are encoded in and retrieved from memory. In visual search, intertrial repetition of targets causes speeded response times (short-term priming). Similarly, targets that are presented more often than others may facilitate search, even long after it is no longer present (long-term priming). In this study, we investigate whether such short-term priming and long-term priming depend on dissociable mechanisms. By recording eye movements while participants searched for one of two conjunction targets, we explored at what stages of visual search different forms of priming manifest. We found both long- and short- term priming effects. Long-term priming persisted long after the bias was present, and was again found even in participants who were unaware of a color bias. Short- and long-term priming affected the same stage of the task; both biased eye movements towards targets with the primed color, already starting with the first eye movement. Neither form of priming affected the response phase of a trial, but response repetition did. The results strongly suggest that both long- and short-term memory can implicitly modulate feedforward visual processing. Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13414-015-1021-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Positive mood ameliorates several cognitive processes: It can enhance cognitive control, increase flexibility, and promote variety seeking in decision making. These effects of positive mood have been suggested to depend on frontostriatal dopamine, which is also associated with the detection of novelty. This suggests that positive mood could also affect novelty detection. In the present study, children and adults saw either a happy or a neutral movie to induce a positive or neutral mood. After that, they were shown novel and familiar images. On some trials a beep was presented over headphones either at the same time as the image or at a 200-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and the task of the participant was to detect these auditory targets. Children were slower in responding than adults. Positive mood, however, speeded responses, especially in children, and induced facilitatory effects of novelty. These effects were consistent with increased arousal. Although effects of novelty were more consistent with an attentional response, in children who had watched a happy movie the novel images evoked a more liberal response criterion, suggestive of increased arousal. This suggests that mood and novelty may affect response behaviour stronger in children than in adults.

Abstract. Research has suggested that the word recognition process is influenced by the integration of orthographic information across words. The precise nature of this integration process may vary, however, depending on whether words are in temporal or spatial proximity. Here we present a lexical decision experiment, designed to compare temporal and spatial integration processes more directly. Masked priming was used to reveal effects of temporal integration, while the flanker paradigm was used to reveal effects of spatial integration. Primes/flankers were high-frequency orthographic neighbors of the target (blue-blur) or unrelated control words (head-blur). We replicated prior observations of inhibition in trials where the neighbor was used as a masked prime, while facilitation was observed in trials where the neighbor was presented as flanker. We conclude that sub-lexical orthographic information is integrated both temporally and spatially, but that spatial information is used to segregate lexical representations activated by spatially distinct sources.

It is often thought that novelty benefits memory formation. However, support for this idea mostly comes from paradigms that are open to alternative explanations. In the present study we manipulated novelty in a word-learning task through task-irrelevant background images. These background images were either standard (presented repeatedly), or novel (presented only once). Two types of background images were used: Landscape pictures and fractals. EEG was also recorded during encoding. Contrary to the idea that novelty aids memory formation, memory performance was not affected by the novelty of the background. In the evoked response potentials, we found evidence of distracting effects of novelty: both the N1 and P3b components were smaller to words studied with novel backgrounds, and the amplitude of the N2b component correlated negatively with subsequent retrieval. We conclude that although evidence from other studies does suggest benefits on a longer time scale, novelty has no instantaneous benefits for learning.

Memory affects visual search, as is particularly evident from findings that when target features are repeated from one trial to the next, selection is faster. Two views have emerged on the nature of the memory representations and mechanisms that cause these intertrial priming effects: independent feature weighting versus episodic retrieval of previous trials. Previous research has attempted to disentangle these views focusing on short term effects. Here, we illustrate that the episodic retrieval models make the unique prediction of long-term priming: biasing one target type will result in priming of this target type for a much longer time, well after the bias has disappeared. We demonstrate that such long-term priming is indeed found for the visual feature of color, but only in conjunction search and not in singleton search. Two follow-up experiments showed that it was the kind of search (conjunction versus singleton) and not the difficulty, that determined whether long-term priming occurred. Long term priming persisted unaltered for at least 200 trials, and could not be explained as the result of explicit strategy. We propose that episodic memory may affect search more consistently than previously thought, and that the mechanisms for intertrial priming may be qualitatively different for singleton and conjunction search. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13414-015-0860-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Temporal preparation has been investigated extensively by manipulating the foreperiod, the interval between a warning stimulus and target stimulus requiring a speeded response. Although such research has revealed many effects of both the duration and distribution of foreperiods on reaction times, the underlying cognitive mechanism is still largely unknown. Here, we test a recent proposal that temporal preparation is driven by the retrieval of memory traces of past experiences from long-term memory rather than by knowledge about upcoming events. Two groups of participants received different foreperiod distributions in an acquisition phase, which was followed a week later by a transfer phase, in which both groups received the same distribution of foreperiods. We found that the effects of the different foreperiod distributions presented in the acquisition phase were still apparent a week later during the transfer phase, as the reaction time patterns of both groups reflected the old distributions. This occurred even though both groups were provided with full information about the change in the distribution of foreperiods at the start of the transfer phase. These findings provide compelling evidence that long-term memory plays an important role in temporal preparation.

The hazard function describes the conditional probability that an event will occur at a given moment, given that it has not yet occurred. In warned reaction time tasks, it is a classical finding that the response to a target stimulus is faster as its hazard is higher, which has led to the widespread belief that hazard somehow drives temporal preparation. Alternatively, recent cognitive theories propose that temporal preparation is driven by memory traces of earlier timing experiences. To distinguish between these views, we presented different groups of participants with different distributions of foreperiods between temporal cues and target stimuli. Three experiments revealed clear transfer effects of this manipulation in a test phase where all participants received, after explicit instruction, the same uniform distribution. These findings demonstrate that temporal preparation is driven by past experience, not by current hazard. (PsycINFO Database Record

Parkinson[U+05F3]s disease (PD) is characterized by a degeneration of nigrostriatal dopaminergic cells, resulting in dopamine depletion. This depletion is counteracted through dopamine replacement therapy (DRT). Dopamine has been suggested to affect novelty processing and memory, which suggests that these processes are also implicated in PD and that DRT could affect them. Objective: To investigate word learning and novelty processing in patients with PD as indexed by the P2 and P3 event-related potential components, and the role of DRT in these processes. Methods: 21 patients with PD and 21 matched healthy controls were included. Patients with PD were tested on and off DRT in two sessions in a counterbalanced design, and healthy controls were tested twice without intervention. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was measured while participants performed a word learning Von Restorff task. Results: Healthy controls showed the typical Von Restorff effect, with better memory for words that were presented in novel fonts, than for words presented in standard font. Surprisingly, this effect was reversed in the patients with PD. In line with the behavioral findings, the P3 was larger for novel than for standard font words in healthy controls, but not in patients with PD. For both groups the P2 and P3 event-related components were larger for recalled versus forgotten words. DRT did not affect these processes. Conclusions: Learning of novel information is compromised in patients with PD. Likewise, the P2 and P3 components that predict successful memory encoding are reduced in PD patients. This was true both on and off DRT, suggesting that these findings reflect abnormalities in learning and memory in PD that are not resolved by dopaminergic medication. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

Visual search requires the maintenance of a search template in visual working memory in order to guide attention towards the target. This raises the question whether a search template is essentially the same as a visual working memory representation used in tasks that do not require attentional guidance, or whether it is a qualitatively different representation. Two experiments tested this by comparing electrophysiological markers of visual working memory maintenance between simple recognition and search tasks. For both experiments, responses were less rapid and less accurate in search task than in simple recognition. Nevertheless, the contralateral delay activity (CDA), an index of quantity and quality of visual working memory representations, was equal across tasks. On the other hand, the late positive complex (LPC), which is sensitive to the effort invested in visual working memory maintenance, was greater for the search task than the recognition task. Additionally, when the same target cue was repeated across trials (Experiment 2), the amplitude of visual working memory markers (both CDA and LPC) decreased, demonstrating learning of the target at an equal rate for both tasks. Our results suggest that a search template is qualitatively the same as a representation used for simple recognition, but greater effort is invested in its maintenance. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

Over 100,000 verbal and visuospatial immediate and delayed memory tests were presented via the Internet to over 28,000 participants in the age range of 11 to 80. Structural equation modeling pointed to the verbal versus visuospatial dimension as an important factor in individual differences, but not the immediate versus delayed dimension. We found a linear decrease of 1% to 3% per year in overall memory performance past the age of 25. For visuospatial tests, this decrease started at age 18 and was twice as fast as the decrease of verbal memory. There were strong effects of education, with the highest educated group sometimes scoring one full standard deviation above the lowest educated group. Gender effects were small but as expected: women outperformed men on the verbal memory tasks; men outperformed women on the visuospatial tasks. We also found evidence of increasing proneness to false memory with age. Memory for recent news events did not show a decrease with age. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

Studies on intertrial priming have shown that in visual search experiments, the preceding trial automatically affects search performance: facilitating it when the target features repeat and giving rise to switch costs when they change-so-called (short-term) intertrial priming. These effects also occur at longer time scales: When 1 of 2 possible target colors is more frequent during an experiment block, this results in a prolonged and persistent facilitation for the color that was biased, long after the frequency bias is gone-so-called long-term priming. In this study, we explore the robustness of such long-term priming. In Experiment 1, participants were fully informed of the bias and instructed to prioritize the other unbiased color. Despite these instructions, long-term priming of the biased color persisted in this block, suggesting that guidance by long-term priming is an implicit effect. In Experiment 2, long-term priming was built up in 1 experimental session and was then assessed in a second session a week later. Long-term priming persisted across this week, emphasizing that long-term priming is truly a phenomenon of long-term memory. The results support the view that priming results from the automatic and implicit retrieval of memory traces of past trials. (PsycINFO Database Record

Visual search is speeded when the target is repeated from trial to trial compared to when it changes, suggesting that selective attention learns from previous events. Such intertrial effects are stronger when there is more competition for selection, for example in ambiguous displays where the target is accompanied by a salient distractor. Here we investigate whether this is because the competition strengthens the learning itself, or because it allows for a learned representation to exert a greater effect. The results point to the latter. Observers looked for a colour-defined target that could repeat or change from trial to trial. A salient distractor could be present on the current trial, the previous trial, both, or neither. Intertrial effects were greater when a distractor was present on the current trial, suggesting that a primed target representation is more beneficial under conditions of competition. In contrast, distractor presence on the previous trial had no effects whatsoever, indicating that the learning process itself is not affected by competition. This suggests that the source of the learning resides at postselection stages, whereas the effects may occur at the perceptual level. © 2012 Copyright Psychology Press Ltd.

Many tests of retrograde amnesia consist of questions on news events. It is therefore important to know how such questions are answered by normal adults. We analysed the retention of news events in a sample of 12,913 participants, who provided basic demographic information and subsequently answered questions about news events randomly sampled from a database. We investigated whether demographic variables could predict differences in the intake and retention of news from several categories, such as sports and business news. Although demographic variables did affect general performance on news questions, differential effects on specific categories were marginal. Gender influenced performance on questions about business news, both age and educational attainment affected performance on political news, and educational attainment also had an effect on performance on science news. © 2009 Psychology Press.

Why does the brain contain more than one memory system? Genetic algorithms can play a role in elucidating this question. Here, model animals were constructed containing a dorsal striatal layer that controlled actions, and a ventral striatal layer that controlled a dopaminergic learning signal. Both layers could gain access to three modeled memory stores, but such access was penalized as energy expenditure. Model animals were then selected on their fitness in simulated operant conditioning tasks. Results suggest that having access to multiple memory stores and their representations is important in learning to regulate dopamine release, as well as in contextual discrimination. For simple operant conditioning, as well as stimulus discrimination, hippocampal compound representations turned out to suffice, a counterintuitive result given findings that hippocampal lesions tend not to affect performance in such tasks. We argue that there is in fact evidence to support a role for compound representations and the hippocampus in even the simplest conditioning tasks. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Acquired equivalence is a paradigm in which generalization is increased between two superficially dissimilar stimuli (or antecedents) that have previously been associated with similar outcomes (or consequents). Several possible mechanisms have been proposed, including changes in stimulus representations, either in the form of added associations or a change of feature salience. A different way of conceptualizing acquired equivalence is in terms of strategic inference: Confronted with a choice on which it has no evidence, the organism may infer from its history of reinforcement what the best option is, and that inference is observed as acquired equivalence. To test this account, we combined an incremental learning task with an episodic memory test. Drawings of faces were made equivalent through acquired equivalence training, and then paired with words in a list learning paradigm. When participants were asked to recognize specific face-word pairings, they confused faces more often when they had been made equivalent. This suggests that prior acquired equivalence training does influence how memories are coded. We also tested whether this change in coding reflected acquisition of new associations, as suggested by the associative mediation account, or whether stimuli become more similar through a reweighting of stimulus features, as assumed by some categorization theories. Results supported the associative mediation view. We discuss similarities between this view and exemplar theories of categorization performance.

In two masked repetition priming experiments with letter stimuli, the positions of prime and target stimuli were varied horizontally from fixation. Priming effects did not interact with position when prime and target location covaried (Experiment 1A) but diminished with increasing prime eccentricity when targets were always centrally located (Experiment 1B). Two accounts of this pattern of priming effects were proposed that postulate two different mechanisms over and above effects of visual acuity. The integration account postulates degree of separation of prime and target stimuli as the critical factor, and the attentional account postulates spatial attention as the critical factor. The results of Experiment 2, in which prime and target positions were manipulated orthogonally, were in favor of the attentional account. Repetition priming did not vary as a function of whether or not primes and targets appeared at the same location, but target processing was facilitated independently of priming when targets appeared at the same location as primes, especially in the right visual field. Copyright 2008 Psychonomic Society, Inc.

People tend to recall more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than from other lifetime periods. Most evidence suggests that differential encoding causes this reminiscence bump. However, the question why personal events are encoded better in those periods is still unanswered. To shed more light on this discussion, we examined memory for public events. Since it is often impossible to ascertain that queried events are equally difficult, we circumvented the issue of equivalence by calculating deviation scores for each trial. We found that participants more frequently answered questions correctly about events that occurred in the period in which they were between 10 and 25 years old. Furthermore, we found that the reminiscence bump was more pronounced for cued recall than for recognition. We argue that these results support the biological account that events are stored better, because the memory system is working more efficiently during adolescence and early adulthood. These results do not falsify the other accounts for differential encoding, because they are not mutually exclusive. © 2007 Psychology Press.

In the present experiment, we investigated whether the memory of a location is affected by the occurrence of an irrelevant visual event. Participants had to memorize the location of a dot. During the retention interval, a task-irrelevant stimulus was presented with abrupt onset somewhere in the visual field. Results showed that the spatial memory representation was affected by the occurrence of the external irrelevant event relative to a control condition in which there was no external event. Specifically, the memorized location was shifted toward the location of the task-irrelevant stimulus. This effect was only present when the onset was close in space to the memory representation. These findings suggest that the "internal" spatial map used for keeping a location in spatial working memory and the "external" spatial map that is affected by exogenous events in the outside world are either the same or tightly linked.

Retrospectively cueing an item retained in visual working memory during maintenance is known to improve its retention. However, studies have provided conflicting results regarding the costs of such retro-cues for the noncued items, leading to different theories on the mechanisms behind visual working memory maintenance and retro-cueing. Here we tested an alternative explanation of the conflicting results regarding retro-cue costs—namely, that they are caused at least partly by differences in retro-cue reliability. We manipulated the ratio of valid-cue trials to invalid-cue trials within blocks. We used a continuous-report procedure that allowed fitting a model that provided recall probability and precision estimates for the memory representations. Reconciling previous contradictory findings, benefits for valid cues were observed in all conditions, but invalid cueing costs were found only when the retro-cue had a high reliability (i.e., was 80 % valid), but not when it had a lower reliability (i.e., 50 % valid). This was found for both the recall probability and the precision of visual working memory representations. Our results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms underlying retro-cue effects are strategically adjusted by participants, depending on the perceived retro-cue reliability.

Sequential effects are ubiquitous in experimental psychology. Within visual search, performance is often speeded when participants search for the same target twice in a row, as opposed to two different targets. Here, we investigate such intertrial priming. Two experiments show that factors influencing search processes affect the presence and size of intertrial priming: It is larger when there are fewer elements in the visual display, and larger when there is a salient distractor present than when the target is the only salient element in the display. A control experiment showed that these increased priming effects were not due to longer baseline RTs. These findings, it is argued, are inconsistent with theories that explain intertrial priming as resulting from either only faster visual selection, or from episodic retrieval of responses. Instead, we propose that ambiguity in the stimulus or task underlies the occurrence of intertrial priming. © 2006 Psychology Press Ltd.

Visual search is speeded when the target-defining property (a feature- or dimension difference relative to the distractors) is repeated relative to when it changes. It is thought that automatic and implicit intertrial priming mechanisms underlie this effect. However, intertrial priming has been found to be less robust in compound search tasks (in which the response property is unrelated to the target-defining property) than in present/absent search tasks (in which the response is directly related to the presence of a target-defining property). This study explored the hypothesis that intertrial priming is dependent on the level of ambiguity in a task, with the present/absent task being inherently more ambiguous than the compound search task. The first three of five experiments further established the dissociation between the tasks and excluded alternative explanations. Intertrial priming was strong in present/absent and go/no-go tasks, but absent in compound and compound/absent tasks. The last two experiments supported the ambiguity hypothesis by introducing more uncertainty in the compound task, after which intertrial priming returned. © 2006 Psychology Press Ltd.

The hippocampal region, a group of brain structures important for learning and memory, has been the focus of a large number of computational models. These tend to fall into two groups: (1) models of the role of the hippocampal region in incremental learning, which focus on the development of new representations that are sensitive to stimulus regularities and environmental context; (2) models that focus on the role of the hippocampal region in the rapid storage and retrieval of episodic memories. Rather than being in conflict, it is becoming apparent that both approaches are partially correct and might reflect the different functions of substructures of the hippocampal region. Future computational models will help to elaborate how these different substructures interact.

We compared judgments of learning (JOLs) that were made either (a) after 1 study trial, (b) 2 study trials, or (c) in-between the 1st and 2nd study trials. In regard to the absolute accuracy of JOLs at predicting subsequent recall, we replicated previous findings of an underconfidence-with-practice effect for immediate JOLs and report for the first time a new finding of an underconfidence-with-practice effect for delayed JOLs (i.e., delayed JOLs after one trial overestimated the likelihood of subsequent recall, whereas delayed JOLs after two trials underestimated that likelihood). Also, although delayed JOLs always had a greater relative accuracy than did immediate JOLs, the relative accuracy of immediate and delayed JOLs was approximately the same after 1 versus 2 study trials. These results demonstrate that additional study trials affect the absolute accuracy of all JOLs but not the relative accuracy of any JOLs. Thus an increase in the number of study trials produced an increasing bias to be underconfident about the subsequent likelihood of recall but did not affect people's ordering of which items had been more (versus less) well-learned.

Novel stimuli reliably attract attention, suggesting that novelty may disrupt performance when it is task-irrelevant. However, under certain circumstances novel stimuli can also elicit a general alerting response having beneficial effects on performance. In a series of experiments we investigated whether different aspects of novelty - stimulus novelty, contextual novelty, surprise, deviance, and relative complexity - lead to distraction or facilitation. We used a version of the visual oddball paradigm in which participants responded to an occasional auditory target. Participants responded faster to this auditory target when it occurred during the presentation of novel visual stimuli than of standard stimuli, especially at SOAs of 0 and 200. ms (Experiment 1). Facilitation was absent for both infrequent simple deviants and frequent complex images (Experiment 2). However, repeated complex deviant images did facilitate responses to the auditory target at the 200. ms SOA (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that task-irrelevant deviant visual stimuli can facilitate responses to an unrelated auditory target in a short 0-200. millisecond time-window after presentation. This only occurs when the deviant stimuli are complex relative to standard stimuli. We link our findings to the novelty P3, which is generated under the same circumstances, and to the adaptive gain theory of the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system (Aston-Jones and Cohen, 2005), which may explain the timing of the effects. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.

Published online: 2 August 2013# Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2013Repetition breeds success. This is the case over the long run, when repeating a certain act leads to learning, but also in the very short one: Over and over again, it has been found that the action that was performed last is primed to be performed again. In the visual search literature, such repetition priming has been studied extensively. Participants tend to find a target more easily when they have to search for the same target as on the previous trial than when the target changes relative to the previous trial (Goolsby & Suzuki, 2001; Huang, Holcombe, & Pashler, 2004; Kristjansson, Wang, & Nakayama, 2002; Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994, 2000; McPeek, Maljkovic, & Nakayama, 1999; Meeter & Olivers, 2006; Muller, Heller, & Ziegler, 1995).Priminginvisualsearchhasbeenfoundfordifferent target features: for the layout of the search scene, for its size, for the to-be given response, and for interactions between these factors (reviewed in Kristjansson & Campana, 2010). Of these factors, priming by a target feature is the most extensively investigated effect, often in the form of priming of pop-out (PoP; Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994). When the unique target feature is repeated on the subsequent trial, the targetisfoundearlier,onaverage,thanwhenthetarget feature is changed. Many researchers have argued that prim- ing in visual search affects attentional selection, in that a repeated target is more likely to be selected early on in a trial than is a nonrepeated target (Becker, Ansorge, & Horstmann, 2009; Brascamp, Blake, & Kristjansson, 2011; Kristjansson & Campana 2010; Meeter & Olivers, 2006).However, placing the locus of priming at the stage of attentional selection does not answer all questions, as it remains unclear what is changed by a previous trial such that attentional selection is speeded. One possibility is that target repetition strengthens the signal that the target elicits in visual brain areas. This is commonly conceptualized as a target having increased activation in a salience map that determines which element in the scene is selected (Becker, 2008; Fecteau & Munoz, 2003; Lee, Mozer, & Vecera, 2009; Meeter & Olivers, 2006). Another possibility is that target signals do not so much become strengthened, but rather that distractor signals are suppressed. Several studies have shown that distractor repetition speeds search independent of target repetition (e.g., Kristjansson & Driver, 2008), suggesting that distractor feature suppression is at least a possible cause of PoP.A third possibility is that no change takes place in atten- tional selection, but that postselection processes are more efficient for a repeated feature. For example, Huang et al. (2004) argued that after a target is selected, observers engage in a checking process to ascertain that they have truly found the target. Huang et al. suggested that this process is speeded specifically through priming.Using reaction time measures, as is typically done in prim- ing studies, these possibilities cannot be disentangled from one another, since the measures reflect both pre- and postattentional processing and cannot dissociate the strength of the individual signals of target and distractor. To this end, we used a novel measure of the effect of a previous trial: the strength of the global effect. The global effect is the finding in eye movement research that when two elements in a visual scene are in relatively close proximity, a fast saccade to one of them generally lands in between the two, instead of on either one (Findlay, 1982; Van der Stigchel, de Vries, Bethlehem, & Theeuwes, 2011; Van der Stigchel & Nijboer, 2011). The global effect is sensitive to the strengths of the signals of the two elements. For example, a saccade will land closer to an element of greater size (Findlay, 1982), greater intensity (Deubel, Wolf, & Hauske, 1984), or greater dissimilarity to the background (Deubel, Findlay, Jacobs, & Brogan, 1988). …

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether time-dependent biases of oculomotor selection as typically observed during visual search are better accounted for by an absolute-processing-speed account (J. P. de Vries, I. T. C. Hooge, M. A. Wiering, & F. A. J. Verstraten, 2011, How longer saccade latencies lead to a competition for salience. Psychological Science, 22, 916-923) or a relative-salience account (e.g., M. Donk, & W. van Zoest, 2008, Effects of salience are short-lived. Psychological Science, 19, 733-739; M. Donk & W. van Zoest, 2011, No control in orientation search: The effects of instruction on oculomotor selection in visual search. Vision Research, 51, 2156-2166). In order to test these two models, we performed an experiment in which participants were instructed to make a speeded eye movement to any of two orientation singletons presented among a homogeneous set of vertically oriented background lines. One singleton, the fixed singleton, remained identical across conditions, whereas the other singleton, the variable singleton, varied such that its orientation contrast relative to the background lines was either smaller or larger than that of the fixed singleton. The results showed that the proportion of eye movements directed toward the fixed singleton varied substantially depending on the orientation contrast of the variable singleton. A model assuming selection behavior to be determined by relative salience provided a better fit to the individual data than the absolute processing speed model. These findings suggest that relative salience rather than the visibility of an element is crucial in determining temporal variations in oculomotor selection behavior and that an explanation of visual selection behavior is insufficient without the concept of a salience map. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved). Language: en

Earlier studies have suggested that information from a prime stimulus can be integrated with target information even when the two stimuli appear at different spatial locations. Here, we examined such location invariance in a masked repetition priming paradigm with single letter and word stimuli. In order to neutralize effects of acuity and spatial attention on prime processing, subliminal prime stimuli always appeared on fixation. Target location varied randomly from trial to trial along the horizontal meridian at one of seven possible locations for letter stimuli (-7° to + 7°) and three positions for word stimuli (-4°, 0°, + 4°). Speed of responding to letter and word targets was affected by target location, and by priming, but the size of repetition priming effects did not vary as a function of target location. These results suggest that masked repetition priming is mediated by representations that integrate information about object identity independently of object location. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

Item does not contain fulltext Item-context binding is crucial for successful episodic memory formation, and binding deficits have been suggested to underlie episodic-memory deficits. Here, our research investigated the facilitation of cued recall and recognition memory by contextual cues in 20 patients with Korsakoff's amnesia, 20 unilateral medial-temporal lobectomy (MTL) patients and 36 healthy controls. In a computerized task participants had to learn 40 nouns that were randomly combined with a photograph of an everyday scene. Korsakoff patients showed a general memory deficit in both the cued recall and the recognition condition. A less severe memory impairment was found in the patients with medial-temporal lobectomy. Contextual cues facilitated cued recall to an equal extent in unilateral temporal lobectomy patients and healthy controls. However, no facilitation was observed in Korsakoff patients, suggesting an impairment in item-context binding during cued recall tasks. In contrast to the presumed exclusive dependency of recognition memory on item information, all groups equally profited from the contextual cues in recognition tasks. Our findings show that unilateral lesions as with MTL result in normal binding of context and item information, while bilateral dysfunction of the hippocampal-diencephalic system results in impaired context and item binding. 6 p.

Many theories assume that preknowledge of an upcoming target helps visual selection. In those theories, a top-down set can alter the salience of the target, such that attention can be deployed to the target more efficiently and responses are faster. Evidence for this account stems from visual search studies in which the identity of the upcoming target is cued in advance. In five experiments, we show that top-down knowledge affects the speed with which a singleton target can be detected but not the speed with which it can be localized. Furthermore, we show that these results are independent of the mode of responding (manual or saccadic) and are not due to a ceiling effect Our results suggest that in singleton search, top-down information does not affect visual selection but most likely does affect response selection. We argue that such an effect is found only when information from different dimensions needs to be integrated to generate a response and that this is the case in singleton detection tasks but not in other singleton search tasks. © 2010 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.

Visual search is speeded when the target-defining property (a feature- or dimension difference relative to the distractors) is repeated relative to when it changes, a phenomenon referred to as intertrial priming. Feature priming is usually weaker than dimension priming, and sometimes even absent. Four experiments tested the hypothesis that feature priming effects are especially weakened when the visual search task also involves dimension changes, the idea being that feature changes become less salient or less relevant relative to the bigger dimension changes. Feature changes were embedded in blocks that only contained feature changes, or in blocks that also carried dimension changes. However, regardless of type of search task, and level of display ambiguity, the dimensional context had little to no effect on the magnitude of feature priming. There were only reliable effects of ambiguity, in line with recent proposals (Meeter & Olivers, 2006).

1. The validity ratios of two studies were erroneously swapped.We reported a validity ratio of 50% for Landman, Spekreijse, and Lamme (2003) and 66.6% for Rerko and Oberauer (2013), where we intended 66.6% for Landman et al. (2003) and 50% for Rerko and Oberauer (2013). 2. For the study of Matsukura, Luck, and Vecera (2007), we reported a validity ratio of 75%, but this was based on an inconsistency in our calculations. A more consistent calculation yields 73.3% instead.

Searching for a target is slower when target features change from trial to trial than when they are repeated. Although heavily studied, it is still not wholly clear what process is influenced by such visual priming. Here, we introduce a new measure to study priming. When a target and distractor are in close proximity, fast saccades generally fall in between the two, a finding known as the global effect. We elicited global effect saccades to study the effects of repeating target or distractor colors on overt attention. Saccades landed closer to a target or distractor in the color of a previous target, suggesting that priming enhances target color signals. This was true even for the fastest eye movements, in the range of express saccades. Distractor color repetition, on the other hand, had no effect, at least in isolation. Visual priming is, we conclude, at least partly the result of boosting perceptual target signals.

Cuing the identity of an upcoming target speeds its detection. This effect is generally assumed to operate on the level of the target dimension, not of its feature identity. Here, we investigated whether that is the case, in a design in which preparing for a cued dimension would incur costs as well as benefits. Participants searched for targets that could be defined on several dimensions, but were also presented with distractors that were defined on the same dimensions. Cuing the identity of an upcoming target increased the effect of distractors defined on the same dimension as the target. This suggests that cuing a target's identity has effects that operate at least partly at the level of the target dimension.

We tested a recent hypothesis suggesting that the eye deviates away from a location when top-down preparation can influence target selection. Participants had to make an eye movement to a peripheral target. Before the upcoming target, a central cue indicated the likely target location. Results show that when the target was presented at a location different from that indicated by the cue, eye movements to the target deviated away from the cued location. Because central cues are under top-down control, the present results are in line with a determining role of top-down preparation on saccade direction. These results contrast with the findings reported in a similar paradigm executed with hand movements, in which the movements were mostly initiated in the direction of the cued location. Therefore, we conclude that inhibitory effects typically observed when executing eye movements may not be observed when executing hand movements in similar conditions. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This research explored the absolute accuracy of judgments of learning (JOLs), wherein absolute accuracy pertains to how well the magnitude of the participant's predictions of recall correspond to his or her subsequent recall. The Anchoring Hypothesis proposes that the magnitude of JOLs does not change systematically with item difficulty; analogous to a broken clock that is correct twice a day, the absolute magnitude of JOLs may be accurate by chance and not because of any inherent predictive ability. Alternatively, the Monitoring Hypothesis proposes that the magnitude of JOLs does vary systematically with item difficulty. The Dual-Factors hypothesis proposes that the absolute accuracy of JOLs is affected by some combination of monitoring and anchoring. In four experiments, participants studied a list of paired-associates with a high, medium or low normative proportion of recall, then made JOLs for every item, and subsequently had a recall test. The absolute accuracy of JOLs was investigated both for immediate JOLs and for delayed JOLs. The results were consistent with the Monitoring Hypothesis for delayed JOLs and with the Dual-Factors Hypothesis for immediate JOLs.