Readers are often confronted with one-sided, conflicting, or even false information when engaging with socioscientific issues. Based on the notion that validation of information is a routine part of comprehension, we conducted four experiments to investigate how explicit validity judgments and nonstrategic validation of (mis)information on socioscientific issues are affected by the interaction between belief consistency and factual accuracy. Experiment 1 (n = 73) and Experiment 2 (n = 50) used a validity judgment task and found that participants made more errors in judging false belief-consistent claims and needed more time to correctly respond to true but belief-inconsistent and to false but belief-consistent claims. Experiment 3 (n = 84) used the epistemic Stroop task to investigate whether readers' beliefs and knowledge also influence nonstrategic validation, even when readers' task does not require an explicit judgment of validity or belief consistency. In the epistemic Stroop task, affirmative responses did not differ significantly between true and false belief-consistent claims, whereas they were longer for false belief-inconsistent claims. Experiment 4 (n = 226) replicated the results for both tasks, controlling for readers' prior knowledge. The results suggest that beliefs may bias explicit validity judgments, but also the nonstrategic processing of socioscientific claims.
Bilingual speakers must regulate cross-language competition to communicate effectively, yet this regulation typically unfolds under concurrent cognitive demands. To characterise how cognitive load shapes bilingual control, we used a dual-task picture-naming paradigm in which 78 proficient Chinese–English bilinguals performed single-language, cued-switching, and voluntary-switching blocks with and without a secondary tone-monitoring task. Cognitive load did not simply undermine performance; instead, it constrained control engagement and prompted context-sensitive reconfiguration. In cued switching, where the L2 is externally required and especially vulnerable to L1 interference, load shifted control towards a more proactive state that protected L2 access via global downregulation of the L1. In voluntary switching, where speakers can exploit trial-by-trial fluctuations in relative activation, load strengthened a reactive selection strategy: participants selected the L2 when it was rapidly accessible but fell back to the L1 when L2 activation was insufficient. Overall, bilingual control adapted to cognitive load by shifting both the mode and strategy of control in a context-dependent manner, showing that what adapts is not only the type of control recruited, but also how it is employed as contextual demands fluctuate.
Previous research suggests that dimensions such as space, time, and quantity are processed through a generalized magnitude system. Past evidence also shows that brightness can interact with numerical quantity. This study examined brightness–number interactions in young and older adults, and their modulations by stimulus-related factors (e.g., numerical ratio, item proportion) and domain-general mechanisms (e.g., executive control). Across four experiments using a numerical Stroop-like task, younger and older adults compared the numerical values of digit pairs varying in numerical magnitude and brightness (i.e., brighter vs. dimmer). Results revealed robust congruency effects (i.e., better performance when both dimensions matched) in both younger and older adults, consistent with the idea of shared magnitude representations across the lifespan. Additionally, congruency effects (a) increased for larger-ratio items, and (b) decreased in blocks with a high proportion of incongruent items. Data also revealed that (a) young and older adults had similar congruency effects, and (b) older adults showed smaller facilitation but larger interference effects in high-conflict conditions. These findings suggest that brightness operates as a magnitude dimension, and highlight the role of domain-general executive mechanisms (e.g., proactive control) in regulating magnitude processing across the lifespan.
Prior knowledge can enhance memory for both schema-congruent and schema-incongruent events. According to the SLIMM framework, memory performance generally follows a U-shaped pattern, with both highly expected and highly surprising events being better remembered than neutral ones. We tested this prediction across four experiments in which participants viewed scenes containing congruent or incongruent objects, rating each as expected or surprising on a four-level scale. Memory was assessed using: (1) old/new item recognition categorized by recollection and familiarity, and (2) source memory, in which participants reported whether objects had been rated as expected or surprising at study. Schema effects on memory varied by test type. Item recognition consistently showed an advantage for expected trials only, primarily via recollection, while familiarity (if assumed independent of recollection) increased with surprise level-contrary to SLIMM's predictions. We hypothesize that schema-related retrieval strategies enhance recollection of expected objects. Source memory did produce a reliable U-shaped pattern, even though this particular task should only produce an advantage for surprising trials according to SLIMM. We suggest participants tagged events as "surprising" or "expected" during study and could later recall the tag. When the tag was 'weak' or unavailable-more likely for moderately categorized events-participants fell back on schema-related retrieval strategy, which benefits retrieval of expected events. Together, these mechanisms produce the observed U-shaped pattern for source memory. Our findings reveal the complex retrieval test dependent manner in which prior knowledge shapes episodic memory.
Degraded speech increases listening effort at the expense of memory encoding, but the flexibility of this resource trade-off under varying motivational conditions remains poorly understood. The present study investigated how encoding intention influences cognitive resource allocation during a speech-in-noise task. Participants’ sentence comprehension was tested using a sentence verification task (SVT) under varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Memory of the sentences was then assessed by a recognition task about which they were either naïve or forewarned. Accuracy in the SVT and memory task represent comprehension and recognition, respectively. Reaction time in the SVT serves as a proxy for listening effort. Increasing noise impaired both comprehension and recognition and required greater listening effort. Forewarning imposed an additional listening effort cost to comprehension, consistent with encoding intention functioning as an upfront cognitive investment. However, noise and forewarning each imposed independent, additive penalties in both comprehension and listening effort rather than a compounding interaction, and gains in recognition were minimal. These findings suggest that intentional encoding does not fundamentally alter the comprehension–memory trade-off during effortful listening. Implications for finite resource models and their assumptions about how motivational and perceptual demands compete for cognitive resources are discussed.
Episodic future thinking, the ability to mentally simulate potential future scenarios, shares many cognitive and neural mechanisms with autobiographical memory. However, despite common underlying processes, recent research suggests important asymmetries in their phenomenology and functional roles. Earlier philosophical perspectives, in particular, suggest that this asymmetry might extend to how morality is represented across past and future, with important implications for how individuals conceptualise and employ morality. Across three studies, we examined whether and how moral content emerges in episodic future thinking compared to autobiographical memory by objectively coding past and future events elicited through different methodologies. Results showed that future events feature less moral content overall compared to memories, contributing to the evidence of a moral asymmetry between past and future representations. This pattern was consistently observed across cueing conditions in Studies 1 and 2, as well as when events were spontaneously retrieved in Study 3. Additionally, the future more often featured morally right events from the agent perspective compared to memories, aligning with earlier evidence on the idealised and self-oriented nature of future simulations. Together, our findings support the idea of a cognitive asymmetry in how morality is represented across different temporal orientations of mental time travel and offer novel insights on the retrieval of moral representations.
This study examines how individuals adapt to varying levels of prospective memory (PM) and ongoing-task difficulty in a cognitively demanding task environment. PM – the ability to remember and execute delayed intentions while engaged in other tasks – depends on flexible allocation of limited-capacity cognitive resources and strategic cognitive control. Prior research has rarely manipulated both PM and ongoing-task difficulty within the same study, has typically used relatively undemanding tasks that unlikely exceed human capacity to manage them, and has often relied on aggregate performance measures that cannot disentangle capacity sharing from cognitive control. To address these limitations, we orthogonally manipulated PM and ongoing-task difficulty within subjects using a demanding air-traffic control task and applied Prospective Memory Decision Control – a cognitive process model that jointly quantifies individuals’ capacity allocation and cognitive control strategies. As PM difficulty increased, participants reallocated cognitive capacity from the ongoing task to the PM task and adopted a cognitive control strategy that favoured PM: raising decision thresholds for ongoing responses and lowering them for PM responses. By contrast, increased ongoing-task difficulty impaired information processing quality for both tasks (i.e., reduced signal-to-noise ratio) and led participants to lower PM thresholds without changing thresholds for the ongoing task. These findings provide model-based evidence consistent with distinct contributions of capacity sharing and cognitive control within the PMDC framework and illustrate the value of formal modelling in a demanding PM setting.
Statistical learning (SL), defined as the ability to extract regularities in the environment, plays a key role in speech segmentation and language acquisition. An important yet still unresolved question is whether top-down attention influences SL, and if so, whether this depends on domain-specific or domain-general attentional resources. To address this question, participants listened to syllables adhering to a statistical structure (forming trisyllabic “words”) under different attentional manipulations. In one (domain-general) condition, participants either engaged with or passively viewed visuospatial stimuli, while in the second (domain-specific) condition, participants engaged with or passively viewed competing linguistic stimuli. SL was assessed using an explicit familiarity-rating task and an implicit reaction-time based syllable detection task. On the explicit measure, participants who engaged in a competing linguistic task performed more poorly than control participants, whereas performance was similar in the two visuospatial conditions, regardless of attentional condition. In contrast, all participants showed comparable and robust performance on the implicit measure of statistical learning. These results suggest that explicit memory for statistical regularities is impaired if, and only if, domain-specific attention is reduced, whereas the implicit expression of SL is robust against reductions in attentional resources of any kind. Moreover, both explicit and implicit performance remained above-chance under conditions of divided attention, even when the concurrent task required linguistic processing. These results have practical implications for language learners, who may be able to extract basic statistical properties of language input while engaging in a concurrent, unrelated task.
Numbers are mentally represented as magnitudes along a continuum, as evidenced by distance and end effects in comparison tasks. Empty sets, representing the absence rather than presence of quantity, pose a challenge to this framework. Previous research has shown that empty sets can exhibit numerical processing signatures, yet the conditions enabling this representation remain unclear. The present studies examined whether perceptual homogeneity is necessary for empty sets to be perceived as numerical entities. In Experiment 1 (N = 72), participants performed nonsymbolic magnitude comparisons under conditions where stimuli backgrounds were homogeneous or heterogeneous. In Experiment 2 (N = 72), homogeneity was varied through the presence or absence of frames surrounding the presented stimuli. Contrary to our hypothesis that perceptual heterogeneity would disrupt numerical processing, distance and end effects for comparisons to empty sets emerged across all conditions in both experiments, including heterogeneous presentations. However, effect sizes varied systematically across conditions, with perceptual features (background patterns, frame presence, frame location) modulating processing efficiency without eliminating the core numerical representation. These findings demonstrate that empty sets are robustly processed as numerical entities across diverse perceptual contexts. This robustness may reflect the intrinsic congruence between empty sets’ numerical value (zero) and perceptual properties (absence of elements), rendering them less sensitive to external perceptual manipulations than non-empty numerosities.
When forming prospective judgments of distraction, people do not have direct metacognitive access to the cognitive effects of task-irrelevant sounds that determine auditory distraction. Instead, they rely on a fluency heuristic, using the subjective ease or difficulty with which a sound is processed as a metacognitive cue. Empirically, this conclusion is supported by metacognitive illusions, with judgments of distraction failing to align with objective distraction. Here we address why and when the fluency heuristic leads to incorrect or correct judgments of distraction. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that fluency reflects processing at multiple processing stages, not all of which are relevant for auditory distraction in the task at hand. Across two experiments, we manipulated the similarity of words within word sequences at two stages of speech processing. In Experiment 1, conceptual similarity was manipulated to influence fluency at the conceptual processing stage. In Experiment 2, perceptual similarity was manipulated to influence fluency at the perceptual processing stage. In line with the fluency heuristic, participants predicted sequences of similar words—whether conceptually or perceptually similar—to be less distracting than sequences of dissimilar words. Objective distraction in serial recall was unaffected by conceptual similarity but was affected by perceptual similarity. These results suggest that fluency reflects processing at multiple processing stages and thereby influences judgments of distraction, whereas objective distraction depends on whether the corresponding processing stage determines auditory distraction in the task at hand. Metacognitive illusions arise when fluency is generated at processing stages that do not determine auditory distraction.
The photo-taking impairment effect is the finding that memory is worse for photographed information compared with information that is merely viewed. Recently, this effect has been extended to smartphone screenshots, suggesting that the effect is related to digital capture more generally. One potential explanation for the impairment is based on the idea of cognitive offloading, which refers to a reliance on an external memory store to save information. Although previous evidence suggests that a conscious offloading strategy may not always be used, it is possible that associations between screenshots and offloading may precipitate an automatic, unconscious form of offloading. Such an account suggests that the costs associated with digital capture may be offset by benefits on other tasks due to redirected cognitive resources. Accordingly, the current study explored whether taking screenshots offers memory benefits as compared with simply viewing pieces of art. Seven preregistered experiments found that screenshotting led to pronounced memory costs, with no consistent benefits across four measures. Participants did not display improved source memory, improved recognition memory for subsequently presented items, or enhanced performance on a subsequent cognitive task compared with viewing alone. We found evidence of a modest boost in recall for a second block of art, but only under very specific experimental methods and when the memory test was scored very leniently. Overall, these findings suggest that screenshotting imposes considerable memory costs without offering compensatory benefits.
This study investigated how aging affects the perceptual span, the spatial limit of visual processing, in traditional Chinese with the gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm. The viewing was either unrestricted or involved varying window sizes where a constant one-character left window was paired with a manipulated right window that revealed two, three, or four upcoming characters. Older readers had slower reading speed, although they did not differ from young readers in gaze durations. In addition, while reading performance was statistically comparable between the four-character window and full-line conditions in both groups, the two groups differed in their reliance on near- and far-foveal information. In particular, there was a larger boost in reading performance for the older readers than for the young readers when the window increased from two to three upcoming characters. In contrast, the young readers exhibited a larger gain than the older readers when the window included the fourth upcoming characters. Together, older Chinese readers appear to be more sensitive to information within three upcoming characters, but were less so to further ones. These findings highlight the interplay between script characteristics and cognitive aging in reading and constrain the range of parameters in developmentally valid computational models of eye-movement control in reading.
While working memory strategies are well documented in adults, little is known about the use and effectiveness of these strategies in children. This study examined self-reported strategy use in children aged 7–10 years on working memory tasks, including those with demands related to everyday and classroom activities. Participants were a subset of 63 children from a working memory training trial in primary school-aged children that found no intervention effects up to 6 months post intervention. At the immediate post-intervention follow-up, children completed five working memory tasks: two backward span tasks (letters and digits), two following instructions tasks (letters and objects), and one n-back task (objects). Children then participated in a semi-structured one-on-one interview about the strategies they used on each task. Strategy use was prevalent across all working memory tasks and was generally associated with superior performance. A range of task-general and task-specific strategies were reported. Participants tended to rely on a single rather than multiple strategies, and more often favored a manipulation rather than maintenance strategy type. While certain strategies, the number of strategies used, and strategy type were linked to superior performance on select working memory tasks, the associations were not consistent across all tasks. These results show that strategic behavior during middle childhood, as in adults, is linked to performance on working memory tasks related to everyday and classroom activities.
Recall performance of studied material typically increases across successive recall cycles, even in the absence of any corrective feedback. Prior research on this hypermnesia effect has predominantly employed free recall as the test format and has generally reported effects of moderate magnitude. Building on a recent incidental observation from a different experimental task, the present study examined whether an initial-letter cued recall (ILCR) format can amplify hypermnesia effects relative to a free-recall format. Across four experiments, participants repeatedly recalled previously studied item lists across three consecutive recall cycles. In Experiments 1-3, the test format involved either free recall (Experiments 2b and 3) or ILCR with a prescribed output order and a 6-s time limit per item (Experiments 1, 2a, and 3). Results showed larger hypermnesia effects in ILCR than in free recall, irrespective of whether words or images with their verbal labels served as study material and whether a 0-min delay or prolonged delays (30 min, 24 h) between study and test were applied. With both test formats, hypermnesia increased with delay. Experiment 4 showed that the results of Experiments 1-3 are critically tied to the constrained ILCR format and do not generalize to an ILCR condition in which all cues are presented simultaneously and participants are free to provide their responses in any order. Results align well with an interpretation based on both the changes in cue set account of hypermnesia and the retrieval practice hypothesis, suggesting a link between hypermnesia and the testing effect.
A relatively large body of research in the working memory (WM) domain has reported a benefit of simultaneous over sequential presentation of memoranda, but this advantage may depend on several factors. Research in visual WM suggests that the advantage of simultaneous over sequential presentation depends on stimulus properties, with simultaneous presentation benefiting simple stimuli and sequential presentation benefiting more meaningful stimuli. The reading literature, on the other hand, suggests that digits may also have a simultaneous presentation advantage, and this particularly when detailed serial order processing is required. The present study examined these assumptions by contrasting simultaneous versus sequential encoding in WM for letter versus digit sequences, and by contrasting item versus serial order WM requirements. In Experiment 1, using an immediate serial recall task, recall performance was higher for simultaneously presented material than sequentially presented material, and higher for digits than for letters. In Experiment 2, a simultaneous encoding advantage and a digit advantage were also observed, as well as a simultaneous presentation advantage that was stronger for digits than for letters. In Experiment 3, the simultaneous and digit advantages remained present when controlling for spatial cues, but their interaction was not supported. These findings indicate that the simultaneous encoding advantage is not reliably modulated by stimulus meaning or by task condition in the verbal WM domain, contrary to predictions derived from the visual WM literature and the reading literature. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of carefully considering both presentation mode and stimulus type when designing verbal WM tasks and interpreting differences in WM performance across studies.
The present research was designed to determine whether an ambiguous, visually presented event is better recalled if an emotional (relative to neutral) verbal interpretation of the event is read before or after seeing the video. There are two competing hypotheses. First, researchers have found that emotional events are better recalled relative to neutral events. As such, one possibility is that the presentation of an emotional verbal interpretation of the event - read before or after the video itself - may enhance subsequent memory of the event. Alternatively, research on the "verbal overshadowing effect" shows that the subsequent verbal description of an event can impair memory for the event itself. This suggests that information presented asynchronously to the video may adversely affect memory for the video. We showed participants (N = 649) 2-min videos that could be interpreted in either a mildly or a very negative emotional way. Before or after viewing a video, people were given a script that allowed for a neutral or negative verbal interpretation of the video itself, with the negative interpretation causing them to have a more robust emotional response to the video. Memories of the video were then assessed either immediately or following a 1- or 7-day delay. Memory of both the video (using detail, inference, and wrong probes) and the text (using verbatim, paraphrase, inference, and wrong probes) were examined. Results revealed an "emotional verbal overshadowing effect," such that emotional information presented asynchronously to the video produced the greatest decrement in subsequent memory.
Successful knowledge generalization requires integrating overlapping experiences into flexible memory representations that support inference beyond direct experience. Although context is known to influence memory retrieval, less is known about how context during learning shapes the integration of overlapping associations. Across two experiments using an associative inference paradigm, we examined whether music functions as a contextual scaffold that supports both direct memory and generalization, and whether these two outcomes rely on the same or different mechanisms. In Experiment 1, participants learned overlapping animal-scene associations with background music or in silence and were tested with silence or music either reinstated or removed. Results showed a clear dissociation. For direct associations, only the Music-On condition (music at both encoding and retrieval) exceeded silence, indicating that reinstating the specific encoding context supports episodic retrieval. For generalization, both Music-On and Music-Off conditions outperformed silence and did not differ from each other, indicating that the benefit was established during encoding and persisted regardless of whether music was present at retrieval. Experiment 2 replicated and extended this pattern by replacing the Music-Off condition with an incongruent-music-at-retrieval condition. For direct associations, incongruent music produced no benefit over silence, ruling out generic music-at-retrieval accounts and suggesting that specific context reinstatement drives episodic retrieval. For generalization, both congruent and incongruent music conditions again exceeded the control. Together, these findings suggest that musical context enhances associative memory via two mechanisms: a specific episodic retrieval cue for directly learned associations, and an encoding-phase scaffold promoting integrated memory structures that support later inference.
The cognitive consequences of multilingual language experience remain a topic of considerable debate. Much of the existing work has focused on executive functions (EF), yet the impacts of multilingualism may also extend to the broader cognitive domain, and they may be subject to changes across the lifespan. In this study, we examined whether degree of language balance was associated with performance in EF and fluid intelligence across adulthood, and whether such associations are more apparent in periods of age-related cognitive change. Participants were 117 young adults and 115 healthy aging adults. Language dominance was measured through self-reporting and L2 vocabulary tests, whereas cognitive assessment included the Stroop task (EF) and WAIS-IV subtests (fluid intelligence). Across analyses, greater language balance showed only weak protective effects against age-related cognitive decline, which did not remain reliable once age and education were included in the models. In the younger adult group, no links between language balance and cognition were observed at all, whereas in the healthy aging group, which represents a period of increased cognitive vulnerability, only minimal and inconsistent patterns emerged. These findings suggest that the cognitive effects of multilingual experience as measured by language dominance in healthy adults are limited and strongly overshadowed by age and educational background, indicating that such effects may be more fragile than previously assumed.
Reading research suggests that readers passively validate incoming textual information with information presented before or other information stored in long-term memory. Nevertheless, readers are often not consciously aware of inconsistencies. In three experiments, we investigated whether illustrating an inconsistency with a picture can increase the awareness of this inconsistency and whether the awareness of inconsistencies differs for inconsistencies presented within the text modality or between the picture and the text modality (i.e., cross-modal validation process). We replicated a study by Singer et al. (2023) but added pictures to the conscious inconsistency detection paradigm introduced there. Participants read short texts and were asked to judge for each sentence whether it was consistent or inconsistent with all information presented before. In Experiment 1, we varied whether a target sentence was consistent or inconsistent with the textual information presented beforehand and whether the information beforehand was illustrated or not. In Experiments 2 and 3, we implemented a condition where the inconsistency was only evident between a picture and the later target sentence, making cross-modal validation processes necessary. All experiments suggested that participants overlooked 40% or more of the inconsistencies and that pictures did not increase the conscious awareness of inconsistencies if the inconsistency was already evident within the text modality. Moreover, Experiments 2 and 3 suggested that cross-modal validation processes occurred. However, participants overlooked even more inconsistencies if the inconsistency was evident between the picture and the text modality. We conclude that cross-modal validation processes may be more resource demanding.
In item-method directed forgetting, directed forgetting occurs when remember-cued items are better retained than forget-cued items, a result often attributable to the rehearsal of remember-cued items and cessation of rehearsal of forget-cued items. Such effects were found in Experiment 1 for happy White and Asian faces, but not when neutral and sad White or Asian faces were presented at study. These results were consistent with predictions from the affect-as-cognitive-feedback hypothesis, according to which positive stimuli promote task-relevant processing whereas negative stimuli stop or reverse those processes. Results of Experiment 2 suggest that Experiment 1 results are not easily attributed to dimensions associated with the photographs (e.g., attractiveness) used in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, recognition was examined for photographs of both Whites and Asians seen at study. Consistent with research on face recognition biases and the 'happy-face effect', more White than Asian faces and more happy than sad photographs were recognized at test. Directed forgetting was found when attention was directed to in-group or out-group faces but with increased task complexity or demands, stimulus attributes come to guide information processing. Suggestions for future studies are presented.
