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One of the best-known demonstrations of long-term learning through repetition is the Hebb effect: Immediate recall of a memory list repeated amidst nonrepeated lists improves steadily with repetitions. However, previous studies often failed to observe this effect for visuospatial arrays. Souza and Oberauer (2022) showed that the strongest determinant for producing learning was the difficulty of the test: Learning was consistently observed when participants recalled all items of a visuospatial array (difficult test) but not if only one item was recalled, or recognition procedures were used (less difficult tests). This suggests that long-term learning was promoted by increased testing demands over the short term. Alternatively, it is possible that lower testing demands still lead to learning but prevented the application of what was learned. In four preregistered experiments (N = 981), we ruled out this alternative explanation: Changing the type of memory test midway through the experiment from less demanding (i.e., single item recall or recognition) to a more demanding test (i.e., full item recall) did not reveal hidden learning, and changing it from the more demanding to a less demanding test did not conceal learning. Mixing high and low demanding tests for nonrepeated arrays, however, eventually produced Hebb learning even for the less demanding testing conditions. We propose that testing affects long-term learning in two ways: Expectations of the test difficulty influence how information is encoded into memory, and retrieval consolidates this information in memory.

Abstract The limited capacity of working memory (WM) constrains how well we can think and act. WM capacity is reduced in old age, with one explanation for this decline being a deficit in using attention to control WM contents. The retro-cue paradigm has been used to examine the ability to focus attention in WM. So far, there are conflicting findings regarding an aging deficit in the retro-cue effect. The present study evaluated age-related changes and individual differences in the retro-cue effect through a well-established computational model that combines speed and accuracy to extract underlying psychological parameters. We applied the drift–diffusion model to the data from a large sample of younger and older adults (total N = 346) that completed four retro-cue tasks. Retro-cues increased the quality of the evidence entering the decision process, reduced the time taken for memory retrieval, and changed response conservativeness for younger and older adults. An age-related decline was observed only in the retro-cue boost for evidence quality, and this was the only parameter capturing individual differences in focusing efficiency. Our results suggest that people differ in how well they can strengthen and protect a focused representation to boost evidence-quality accumulation, and this ability declines with aging.

Attention is a multifaceted mechanism operating on space, features, and memory. Previous studies reported both decline and preservation of attention in aging. Yet, it is unclear if healthy aging differentially affects attentional selection in these domains. To address these inconsistencies, we evaluated the ability to focus attention using a battery of 11 tasks in a large sample of younger and older adults (n = 172/174). We addressed whether (a) individual differences and aging effects are consistent across different attention tasks and (b) there is a domain-specific or domain-general age-related decline in focused attention. Both younger and older adults benefited from focusing attention on space, features, and memory representations. Confirmatory factor analysis showed substantial commonalities in baseline performance across all tasks, indicating shared variance in decision-making and memory processes. Focused-attention effects, however, formed separate factors reflecting spatial-, feature-, and memory-based attentional efficiency. Correlations between these factors were generally low and inconsistent for both age groups. This supports the view that focused attention is not a single ability. Within the same domain, some tasks showed a decline, whereas others showed improvement with aging, and, on average, attentional benefits were similar across age groups. Accordingly, our results are inconsistent with the claim that aging is associated with either domain-specific or domain-general decline in focused attention. Public Significance Statement: Longevity has boomed, confronting society with the need to foster the quality of life of the growing aging population. Being able to independently perform daily tasks is essential for well-being, and this depends critically on the fitness of our attentional abilities. Well-tuned perceptual attention abilities are needed to efficiently navigate our crowded sensory environment, and we also need an attention mechanism to select among thoughts, memories, and actions. Studies have pointed either to decline or preservation of attention in aging, creating an inconsistent picture. Our study provides a comprehensive assessment of the ability to focus attention on spatial locations, features, and memory representations in a large sample of younger and older adults. We found no evidence that attentional functions decline as people age: Younger and older adults could efficiently focus attention on all domains assessed, thereby improving their performance. The focus of attention remains sharp as people age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we maintain information about spatial configurations in mind? Many working memory (WM) models assume that rehearsal processes are used to counteract forgetting in WM. Here, we investigated the contributions of gaze-based and attention-based rehearsal for protecting spatial representations from time-based forgetting. Participants memorized 6 locations selected from a grid of 30 scattered dots. Memory was tested after 1.5 or 4.5 s, and this interval was either blank or the grid remained onscreen (which is assumed to provide rehearsal support). In 2 experiments, we monitored eye movements during the retention phase, or asked participants to fixate the screen center. In 3 subsequent experiments, we tested spatial WM under dual-task conditions inhibiting shifts of visuospatial attention or central attention to the memoranda. Memory was better and more resistant to time-based forgetting in the grid than blank condition. Recording of fixations showed more frequent and efficient gaze-based rehearsal in the presence of the grid. Fixations toward distractor locations occurred at a similar frequency in the blank and grid conditions, and it did not predict incorrect recalls. Inhibition of eye-movements or shifts of visuospatial attention impaired memory overall, but it did not change the grid benefit nor the rate of time-based forgetting. In contrast, distracting central attention increased time-based forgetting regardless of grid presence. These results indicate that (a) the grid benefit is only partially explained by rehearsal; (b) gaze-errors (i.e., distractor fixations) do not lead to more forgetting; and (c) the maintenance of spatial representations over time depends on central processing.

Behavioral change has been increasingly recognized as a means for combating climate change. However, being concerned about climate problems and knowing the importance of individual actions in mitigating them is not enough for greater adherence to a more sustainable lifestyle. Psychological barriers such as (1) finding change unnecessary; (2) conflicting goals; (3) interpersonal relationships; (4) lack of knowledge; and (5) tokenism have been proposed as an explanation for the gap between environmental attitudes and actions. Yet, so far, this hypothesis has remained untested. This study aimed to assess if psychological barriers moderate the association between environmental attitudes and climate action. A sample of Portuguese individuals (N = 937) responded to a survey measuring climate change beliefs and environmental concerns as an index of environmental attitudes, a scale of self-reported frequency of environmental action, and finally, the dragons of inaction psychological barrier scale. Our participants revealed generally elevated positive environmental attitudes. These attitudes were positively and moderately related to greater self-reported frequency of environmental action in areas such as reusing materials, reduced consumption of animal products, water and energy saving, and airplane use, but not driving less. Critically, the association between attitudes and behavior was negatively moderated by psychological barriers for the reuse, food, and saving domains, but not for driving or flying. In conclusion, our results corroborate the assumption that psychological barriers can partly explain the attitude-behavior gap in the climate action domain.

Chunking is the recoding of smaller units of information into larger, familiar units. Chunking is often assumed to help bypassing the limited capacity of working memory (WM). We investigate how chunks are used in WM tasks, addressing three questions: (a) Does chunking reduce the load on WM? Across four experiments chunking benefits were found not only for recall of the chunked but also of other not-chunked information concurrently held in WM, supporting the assumption that chunking reduces load. (b) Is the chunking benefit independent of chunk size? The chunking benefit was independent of chunk size only if the chunks were composed of unique elements, so that each chunk could be replaced by its first element (Experiment 1), but not when several chunks consisted of overlapping sets of elements, disabling this replacement strategy (Experiments 2 and 3). The chunk-size effect is not due to differences in rehearsal duration as it persisted when participants were required to perform articulatory suppression (Experiment 3). Hence, WM capacity is not limited to a fixed number of chunks regardless of their size. (c) Does the chunking benefit depend on the serial position of the chunk? Chunks in early list positions improved recall of other, not-chunked material, but chunks at the end of the list did not. We conclude that a chunk reduces the load on WM via retrieval of a compact chunk representation from long-term memory that replaces the representations of individual elements of the chunk. This frees up capacity for subsequently encoded material.

People often listen to music while doing cognitive tasks. Yet, whether music harms or helps performance is still debated. Here, we assessed the objective and subjective effects of music with and without lyrics on four cognitive tasks. College students completed tasks of verbal and visual memory, reading comprehension, and arithmetic under three conditions: silence, instrumental music, and music with lyrics. Participants judged their learning during and after each condition. Music with lyrics hindered verbal memory, visual memory, and reading comprehension (d ≈ –0.3), whereas its negative effect (d = –.19) on arithmetic was not credible. Instrumental music (hip-hop lo-fi) did not credibly hinder or improve performance. Participants were aware of the detrimental impact of the lyrics. Instrumental music was, however, sometimes perceived as beneficial. Our results corroborate the general distracting effect of background music. However, faulty metacognition about music’s interfering effect cannot fully explain why students often listen to music while studying.

There is a growing interest in specifying the mechanisms underlying refreshing, i.e., the use of attention to keep working memory (WM) contents accessible. Here, we examined whether participants' visual fixations during the retention interval of a WM task indicate the current focus of internal attention, thereby serving as an online measure of refreshing. Eye movements were recorded while participants studied and maintained an array of colored dots followed by probed recall of one (Experiments 1A and 1B) or all (Experiment 2) of the memoranda via a continuous color wheel. Experiments 1A and 2 entailed an unfilled retention interval in which refreshing is assumed to occur spontaneously, and Experiment 1B entailed a retention interval embedded with cues prompting the sequential refreshment of a subset of the memoranda. During the retention interval, fixations revisited the locations occupied by the memoranda, consistent with a looking-at-nothing phenomenon in WM, but the pattern was only evident when placeholders were onscreen in Experiment 2, indicating that most of these fixations may largely reflect random gaze. Furthermore, spontaneous fixations did not predict recall precision (Experiments 1A and 2), even when ensuring that they did not reflect random gaze (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1B, refreshing cues increased fixations to the eventually tested target and predicted better recall precision, which interacted with an overall benefit of target fixations, such that the benefit of fixations decreased as the number of refreshing cues increased. Thus, fixations under spontaneous conditions had no credible effect on recall precision, whereas the beneficial effect of fixations under instructed refreshing conditions may indicate situations in which cues were disregarded. Consequently, we conclude that eye movements do not seem suitable as an online measure of refreshing.

One of the best-known demonstrations of long-term learning through repetition is the Hebb effect: Immediate recall of a memory list repeated amidst nonrepeated lists improves steadily with repetitions. However, previous studies often failed to observe this effect for visuospatial arrays. Souza and Oberauer (2022) showed that the strongest determinant for producing learning was the difficulty of the test: Learning was consistently observed when participants recalled all items of a visuospatial array (difficult test) but not if only one item was recalled, or recognition procedures were used (less difficult tests). This suggests that long-term learning was promoted by increased testing demands over the short term. Alternatively, it is possible that lower testing demands still lead to learning but prevented the application of what was learned. In four preregistered experiments (N =981), we ruled out this alternative explanation: Changing the type of memory test midway through the experiment from less demanding (i.e., single item recall or recognition) to a more demanding test (i.e., full item recall) did not reveal hidden learning, and changing it from the more demanding to a less demanding test did not conceal learning. Mixing high and low demanding tests for nonrepeated arrays, however, eventually produced Hebb learning even for the less demanding testing conditions. We propose that testing affects long-term learning in two ways: Expectations of the test difficulty influence how information is encoded into memory, and retrieval consolidates this information in memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is usually assumed that articulatory rehearsal improves verbal working memory. Complex span is the most used paradigm to assess working memory functioning; yet, we still lack knowledge about how participants rehearse in this task, and whether these rehearsals are beneficial. In Experiment 1, we investigated the patterns of naturally occurring overt rehearsals in a complex span task requiring processing of a non-verbal distractor task. For comparison, another group of participants completed a matched simple span task with an unfilled delay in between the memoranda. Time permitting, participants rehearsed the memory list in forward serial order, a strategy known as cumulative rehearsal. The degree of cumulative rehearsal was correlated with recall accuracy in both span tasks. Rehearsal frequency was, however, reduced in complex span compared to simple span. To assess the causal role of rehearsal in complex span, we trained a group of participants in a cumulative rehearsal strategy in Experiment 2. This instruction substantially increased the prevalence of cumulative rehearsals compared to a control group. However, the increase in cumulative rehearsal did not translate into an increase in recall accuracy. Our results provide further evidence that rehearsal does not benefit working memory performance.

Binary classification has numerous applications. For one, lie detection methods typically aim to classify each tested person either as “liar” or as “truthteller” based on the given test results. To infer practical implications, as well as to compare different methods, it is essential to assess the diagnostic efficiency, such as demonstrating the number of correctly classified persons. However, this is not always straightforward. In Concealed Information Tests (CITs), the key predictor value (probe-irrelevant difference) for “truthtellers” is always similar (zero on average), and “liars” are always distinguished by a larger value (i.e., a larger number resulting from the CIT test, as compared to the zero baseline). Thereby, in general, the larger predictor values a given CIT method obtains for “liars” on average, the better this method is assumed to be. This has indeed been assumed in countless studies, and therefore, when comparing the classification efficiencies of two different designs, the mean difference of “liar” predictor values in the two designs were simply compared to each other (hence not collecting “truthteller” data to spare resources). We show, based on the meta-data of 12 different experimental designs collected in response time-based CIT studies, that differences in dispersion (i.e., variance in the data, e.g. the extent of random deviations from the zero average in case of “truthtellers”) can substantially influence classification efficiency–to the point that, in extreme cases, one design may even be superior in classification despite having a larger mean “liar” predictor value. However, we also introduce a computer simulation procedure to estimate classification efficiency in the absence of “truthteller” data, and validate this procedure via a meta-analysis comparing outcomes based on empirical data versus simulated data.

Messages to promote health behavior are essential when considering health promotion, disease prevention, and healthy life expectancy. The present study aimed to examine whether (1) positive and negative goal-framing messages affect message memory and behavioral intention differently in younger, middle-aged, and older adults, (2) framing effects are mediated by interest in health (health promotion and disease prevention) and emotion regulation (cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression), and (3) mediation effects differ between positive and negative frames. Participants (N = 1248) aged 20 to 70 years were divided into positive and negative frame conditions. Framing demonstrated interactive effects on message memory; all age groups showed higher recognition accuracy in the positive than the negative frame. The accuracy of younger adults was higher than that of older adults in the negative frame, while older adults showed higher accuracy than younger adults in the positive frame. Additionally, recognition accuracy was higher in the positive frame, as participants had higher interest in health promotion and used cognitive reappraisal more frequently. Contrariwise, emotion regulation and interest in health promotion did not have significant effects on memory in negative frames. Moreover, regardless of the message valence, age did not influence behavioral intention directly but was mediated by interest in health and emotion regulation, while the older the participants were, the higher their interest in health, resulting in higher intention. For emotion regulation, intention increased with higher reappraisal scores and decreased with increasing suppression. Our results suggest that interest in health and emotion regulation should be considered when examining the relationship between age and goal-framing for health messages.