Three studies examined the effect of primed psychological distance on level of perceptual construal, using Navon’s paradigm of composite letters (global letters that are made of local letters). Relative to a control group, thinking of the more distant future (Study 1), about more distant spatial locations (Study 2), and about more distant social relations (Study 3) facilitated perception of global letters relative to local letters. Proximal times, spatial locations, and social relations had the opposite effect. The results are discussed within (...) the framework of Construal Level Theory of psychological distance (Liberman & Trope, 2008; Trope & Liberman, 2003). (shrink)

This study examined the effects of post-cue interval and cognitive load on item-method directed forgetting. The results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 showed that forget item retention increased as the post-cue interval increased. Moreover, increasing the cognitive load of participants by asking them to perform a secondary counting task did not impair, but rather facilitated, the intentional forgetting of the studied item under long post-cue interval conditions. These results and analyses of recall gains from the additional use of the (...) independent cue suggest that the improved recall of forget items caused by an increase in the post-cue interval came from an automatic process, and that after receiving the forget cue, participants did not engage a suppression operation that was resource-demanded. The current findings suggest that forgetting is more effective when participants perform a secondary task after receiving the forget cue. (shrink)

The issue of meaningful yet unexpressed background - to language, to our experiences of the body - is one whose exploration is still in its infancy. There are various aspects of "invisible," implicit, or background experiences which have been investigated from the viewpoints of phenomenology, cognitive psychology, and linguistics. I will claim that James, as explicated by Gurwitsch and others, has analyzed the phenomenon of fringes in such a way as to provide a structural framework from which to investigate and (...) better understand those ideas or concepts that are unexpressed, particularly those experienced in the sense of being sought-after. I will consider Johnson?s conception of the image -schematic gestalt as a way of bridging the descriptive gap between phenomenology and cognitive psychology. Starting from an analysis of the fringes, I will turn to a consideration of the of tip-of-tongue state, as a kind of feeling-of-knowing state, from a variety of approaches, focusing mainly on cognitive psychology and phenomenology. I will then integrate a phenomenological analysis of these experiences, from the James/Gurwitsch structural viewpoint, with a cognitive/ phenomenological analysis in terms of ISGs; and further integrate that with a cognitive/functional analysis of consciousness. I will employ this synthesis of three viewpoints to explore the thesis that the TOT state and similar experiences may relate to the gestalt nature of schemas as well as to particular cues, and may thus be experienced as an aspect of the continuum to the general background to all our conscious experiences. (shrink)

An action-oriented theory of embodied memory is favorable for many reasons, but it will not provide a quick yet clean solution to the grounding problem in the way Glenberg (1997t) envisages. Although structural mapping via analogical representations may be an adequate mechanism of cognitive representation, it will not suffice to explain representation as such.

Retrieval Induced Forgetting refers to the finding that the retrieval of some items from memory impairs the retrieval of related items. The RIF effect is indicated by a comparison of RP- with unrelated but also tobe- remembered items. Since RIF appears during intentional memorizing of words, therefore we checked whether it depends on attentional control involved in goal maintenance, and also if implicit evaluations of to-be-remembered contents moderate this process. In three experiments, each including AC as the independent variable, we (...) found AC to be related to the RIF effect. Only high but not low AC subjects showed the presence of RIF. The results of the affective priming procedure showed that implicit evaluations of NRP items moderate the relationship of high AC and the RIF effect. The explanation why temporarily devaluated NRP could enhance the RIF effect and suggestion concerning future research summarize the article. (shrink)

Two experiments examined the contribution of working memory (WM) to the retrieval and inhibition of background knowledge about counterexamples (alternatives and disablers, Cummins, ) during conditional reasoning. Experiment 1 presented a conditional reasoning task with everyday, causal conditionals to a group of people with high and low WM spans. High spans rejected the logically invalid AC and DA inferences to a greater extent than low spans, whereas low spans accepted the logically valid MP and MT inferences less frequently than high (...) spans. In Experiment 2, an executive-attention-demanding secondary task was imposed during the reasoning task. Findings corroborate that WM resources are used for retrieval of stored counterexamples and that people with high WM spans will use WM resources to inhibit the counterexample activation when the type of counterexample conflicts with the logical validity of the reasoning problem. (shrink)

Recently, a new method of considering successful intentional thought suppression has emerged. This method, the think/no-think paradigm has been utilized over a multitude of settings and has fairly robustly demonstrated the ability to interfere with memory recall. The following experiment examined the effect of intentional thought suppression on recognition memory of nonverbalizeable shapes. In this experiment, participants learned word–shape targets. For some of the pairs, they rehearsed the shape when presented with the word; for others, they suppressed the shape when (...) presented with the word. Finally, participants were shown multiple shapes, one at a time, and asked to identify which they had previously seen as paired with a word. Results of the experiment indicated that, similar to results involving words, participants were less accurate in identifying suppressed shapes, as compared to rehearsed shapes. Implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Long-term memory manages its contents to facilitate adaptive behaviour, amplifying representations of information relevant to current goals and expediting forgetting of information that competes with relevant memory traces. Both mnemonic selection and inhibition maintain congruence between the contents of long-term memory and an organism’s priorities. However, the capacity of these processes to modulate affective mnemonic representations remains ambiguous. Three empirical experiments investigated the consequences of mnemonic selection and inhibition on affectively charged and neutral mnemonic representations using an adapted retrieval practice (...) paradigm. Participants encoded neutral cue words and affectively negative or neutral associates and then selectively retrieved a subset of these associates multiple times. The consequences of selection and inhibitory processes engaged during selective retrieval were evaluated on a final memory test in which recall for all studied associates was probed. Analyses of memory recall indicated that both affectively neutral and negative mnemonic representations experienced similar levels of enhancement and impairment following selective retrieval, demonstrating the susceptibility of affectively salient memories to these mnemonic processes. These findings indicate that although affective memories may be more strongly encoded in memory, they remain amenable to inhibition and flexibly adaptable to the evolving needs of the organism. (shrink)

The present study aims to delineate the working mechanism of prediction in sentence comprehension, by disentangling the influence of the facilitated general memory retrieval from the coexistent influence of the predicted language-specific semantic and/or syntactic information for the first time. The results support that prediction might influence the downstream cognitive processing in two aspects: the pre-activated information facilitates the retrieval of a matched input in memory and, the pre-activated information interacts with higher-level semantic/syntactic processing. More importantly, the present findings suggest (...) that these two types of influences seem to occur at different stages of sentence comprehension: the facilitated memory retrieval of the input modulates N400 amplitude and the latency of post-N400 late central-parietal positivity/P600, while the predicted semantic/syntactic information and/or their interactions modulate the amplitude of the late positivity. The present findings would be helpful for interpreting the underlying mechanism of observed effects in prediction studies. (shrink)

Memory is modified through the act of retrieval. Although retrieving a target piece of information may strengthen the retrieved information itself, it may also serve to weaken retention of related information. This phenomenon, termed retrieval-induced forgetting, has garnered substantial interest for its implications as to why forgetting occurs. The present study attempted to replicate the seminal work by Anderson, Bjork, and Bjork (1994) on retrieval-induced forgetting, given the apparent sensitivity of the effect to certain deviations from the original paradigm developed (...) to study the phenomenon. The study extends the conditions under which retrieval-induced forgetting has been examined by utilizing both a traditional college undergraduate sample (Experiment 1), along with a more diverse internet sample (Experiment 2). In addition, Experiment 3 details a replication attempt of retrieval-induced forgetting using Anderson and Spellman’s (1995) independent cue procedure. Retrieval-induced forgetting was observed when using the traditional retrieval practice paradigm with undergraduate (Experiment 1) and internet (Experiment 2) samples, though the effect was not found when using the independent cue procedure (Experiment 3). Thus, the study can provide an indication as to the robustness of retrieval-induced forgetting to deviations from the traditional college undergraduate samples that have been used in the majority of existing research on the effect. (shrink)

Selective retrieval of task-relevant information often facilitates memory retention of that information. However, it is still unclear if selective retrieval of task-relevant information can alter memory for task-irrelevant information, and the role of emotional arousal in it. In two experiments, we used emotional and neutral faces as stimuli, and participants were asked to memorise the name (who is this person?) and location (where does he/she come from?) associated with each face in initial study. Then, half of the studied faces were (...) presented as cues, and participants were asked to retrieve the corresponding names (Experiment 1) or locations (Experiment 2). Finally, all the faces were presented and participants were asked to retrieve both the corresponding names and locations. The results of the final test showed that retrieval practice not only enhanced memory of task-relevant information but also enhanced memory of task-irrelevant information. More importantly, negative emotion amplified the retrieval practice effect overall, with a larger retrieval-induced benefit for the negative than neutral condition. These findings demonstrated an emotional arousal amplification effect on retrieval-induced enhancement effects, suggesting that the advantage of the retrieved memory representations can be amplified by emotional arousal even without explicit goals in a task setting. (shrink)