Memory & Cognition back issues from September 2006:
Predictability of locomotion: Effects on updating of spatial situation models during narrative comprehension
Sep 01, 2006; ... We investigated how the updating of spatial situation models during narrative comprehension depends on the interaction of cognitive abilities and text characteristics. Participants with low verbal and visuospatial abilities and participants with high abilities read narratives in which the ...
Character movement and the representation of space during narrative comprehension
Sep 01, 2006; ... Traditional research on situation models has examined the accessibility of locations and objects during narrative experiences. These studies have described a ubiquitous gradient effect: Spatial locations and objects in reader focus are more accessible than locations farther from this focus, with ...
Making sense of abstract events: Building event schemas
Sep 01, 2006; ... Everyday events, such as making a bed, can be segmented hierarchically, with the coarse level characterized by changes in the actor's goals and the fine level by subgoals (Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001). Does hierarchical event perception depend on knowledge of actors' intentions? This ...
Planning and task management in older adults: Cooking breakfast
Sep 01, 2006; ... The article describes a simulated "cooking breakfast" task in which participants must remember to start and stop cooking five foods so that all the foods are "ready" at the same time. In between starting and stopping operations, the participants also carried out a "table-setting" task as a ...
Priming or executive control? Associative priming of cue encoding increases "switch costs" in the explicit task-cuing procedure
Sep 01, 2006; ... The explicit task-cuing procedure involves presenting a cue that indicates which task to perform on a target. Responses are typically faster when tasks repeat than when they alternate, and this difference is often interpreted as a measure of the time required for executive control processes to ...
Accounting for sequential trial effects in the flanker task: Conflict adaptation or associative priming?
Sep 01, 2006; ... The conflict-control loop theory proposes that the detection of conflict in information processing triggers an increase in cognitive control, resulting in improved performance on the subsequent trial. This theory seems consistent with the robust finding that conflict susceptibility is reduced ...
Effects of repetition on memory for pragmatic inferences
Sep 01, 2006; ... Social interaction requires active inferential processing on the part of the listener. Such inferences can affect memory. For example, after hearing the karate champion hit the cinder block, one might erroneously recollect having heard the verb broke (Brewer, 1977)-a reasonable inference, but ...
Familiarity and relational preference in the understanding of noun-noun compounds
Sep 01, 2006; ... When people are presented with noun-noun compounds, they tend to produce two main types of interpretation: relational and property interpretations. One theory of compounding maintains that relational interpretations are preferred over property ones. However, many of the studies supporting this ...
Repetition proportion biases masked priming of lexical decisions
Sep 01, 2006; ... Although subjects have little or no awareness of masked primes, Bodner and Masson (2001) found that priming of lexical decisions is often enhanced when masked repetition primes occur on a high proportion of trials. We used baseline prime conditions to specify the locus of this repetition ...
Hemispheric processing of inferences: The effects of textual constraint and working memory capacity
Sep 01, 2006; ... In this study, we investigated hemispheric differences in the generation of bridging and predictive inferences. Participants read texts that provided either strong or weak causal constraints for a particular bridging (Experiment 1) or predictive (Experiment 2) inference and performed a lexical ...
Distinctiveness revisited: Unpredictable temporal isolation does not benefit short-term serial recall of heard or seen events
Sep 01, 2006; ... The notion of a link between time and memory is intuitively appealing and forms the core assumption of temporal distinctiveness models. Distinctiveness models predict that items that are temporally isolated from their neighbors at presentation should be recalled better than items that are ...
Contextual knowledge reduces demands on working memory during reading
Sep 01, 2006; ... An experiment is reported in which young, middle-aged, and older adults read and recalled ambiguous texts either with or without the topic title that supplied contextual knowledge. Within each of the age groups, the participants were divided into those with high or low working memory (WM) spans, ...
Relational processing and working memory capacity in comprehension of relative clause sentences
Sep 01, 2006; ... Previous research has indicated that the cognitive load imposed by tasks in various content domains increases with the complexity of the relational information processed. Sentence comprehension entails processing noun-verb relations to determine who did what to whom. The difficulty of ...
Dissociating the influence of familiarity and meaningfulness from word frequency in naming and lexical decision performance
Sep 01, 2006; ... Performance in two experiments was compared on a list of words of high and low frequency in which familiarity/meaningfulness (FM) was balanced and on a list of high- and low-frequency words in which FM was confounded with frequency (i.e., high frequency-high familiarity vs. low frequency-low ...