Memory & cognition
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The term contextual cuing refers to improved visual search performance with repeated exposure to a configuration of objects. Participants use predictive cues-derived from learned associations between target locations and the spatial arrangement of the surrounding distractors in a configuration--to efficiently guide search behavior. Researchers have claimed that contextual cuing can occur implicitly. ⋯ At a group level, learning did not precede awareness. Although contextual cuing was evident in participants who were selected post hoc as having no explicit awareness, and for specific configurations that did not support awareness, we argue that awareness may nevertheless be a necessary concomitant of contextual cuing. These results demonstrate that contextual cuing knowledge is accessible to awareness.
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Recognition without identification is the finding that participants can recognize recognition test items as having been previously studied when the test items themselves are presented in such a way that their identification is hindered. The present study demonstrates this phenomenon in face recognition. Participants studied names of celebrities before receiving a recognition test containing pictures of celebrity faces. ⋯ Among the faces that went unidentified, ratings discriminated between celebrities whose names were studied and celebrities whose names were not studied. This recognition without face identification effect is dependent upon the sense of being in a tip-of-the-tongue state for a particular name. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed.
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Recent studies have shown the existence of two qualitatively distinct groups of people based on how they judge the probability of a conditional statement. The present study was designed to test whether these differences are rooted in distinctive means of processing conditional statements and whether they are linked to differences in general intelligence. ⋯ The results showed a number of predicted effects: People responding with conditional (rather than conjunctive) probabilities on the first task were higher in cognitive ability, showed reasoning patterns more consistent with a suppositional treatment of the conditional, and showed a strongly "defective" truth table pattern. The results include several novel findings and post challenges to contemporary psychological theories of conditionals.
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The present study examined the influence of perspective instructions on online processing of expository text during repeated reading. Sixty-two participants read either a high or a low prior knowledge (HPK vs. LPK) text twice from a given perspective while their eye movements were recorded. ⋯ Repeated reading facilitated processing, as indicated by all eye movement measures. After the perspective switch, a repetition benefit was observed for the previously relevant text information, whereas a repetition cost was found for the previously irrelevant text information. These results indicate that reading perspective and prior knowledge have a significant influence on how readers allocate visual attention during reading.
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Generating solutions to anagrams leads to a memory advantage for those solutions, with generated words remembered better than words simply read. However, an additional advantage is not typically found for solutions to difficult anagrams relative to solutions to easy ones, presenting a challenge for the cognitive effort explanation of the generation effect. ⋯ However, when attention is directed to the anagrams themselves, asking participants to remember the kinds of anagrams generated or solved (based on kind of rule rather than subjective impressions of difficulty), a similar source advantage is not observed. The present studies bring a new perspective to the investigation of difficulty manipulations on memory for problem solving by illustrating the impact of a shift in focus from the effort mediating cognitive operations to specifics about the cognitive operations themselves.