Memory & Cognition最新文献

{"title":"Morality across time: Evidence for a moral asymmetry between episodic future thinking and autobiographical memory.","authors":"Alessandro Messina, Ana Lucía Cardenas-Egúsquiza, Dorthe Berntsen","doi":"10.3758/s13421-026-01907-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01907-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":48398,"journal":{"name":"Memory & Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148799710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Quantifying the effects of prospective memory and ongoing task difficulty on capacity sharing and cognitive control.","authors":"Russell J Boag, Luke Strickland, Andrew Heathcote, Shayne Loft","doi":"10.3758/s13421-026-01929-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01929-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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. Key Points • Successful prospective memory (PM) requires an ability to concurrently manage PM and ongoing task demands. • We present and test a cognitive model that explains how individuals use selective attention (capacity) and cognitive control to adapt to changes in PM and ongoing-task difficulty in a demanding air traffic control task paradigm. • Individuals adapt to increased PM difficulty by reallocating (sharing) cognitive capacity from the ongoing task to the PM task, and by adopting a decision-control strategy favourable to PM responding. • Increased ongoing-task difficulty reduced the quality (signal-to-noise ratio) of information processing for both tasks (i.e., reduced/shared capacity). • Successful adaptation to PM and ongoing-task difficulty can rely upon capacity sharing and the strategic use of cognitive countermeasures.</p>","PeriodicalId":48398,"journal":{"name":"Memory & Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148686475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When attention matters: Domain-specific disruption of explicit but not implicit memory in statistical learning.","authors":"Stacey D Reyes, Stephen C Van Hedger, Priya B Kalra, Laura J Batterink","doi":"10.3758/s13421-026-01920-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01920-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":48398,"journal":{"name":"Memory & Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148680545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Looking at nothing but seeing something: The resilient numerical representation of empty sets.","authors":"Rut Zaks-Ohayon, Serena Mingolo, Joseph Tzelgov, Michal Pinhas","doi":"10.3758/s13421-026-01925-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01925-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":48398,"journal":{"name":"Memory & Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148680589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Testing the validity of fluency as a metacognitive cue for judgments of distraction in serial recall.","authors":"Gesa Fee Komar, Axel Buchner, Raoul Bell","doi":"10.3758/s13421-026-01923-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01923-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":48398,"journal":{"name":"Memory & Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148674402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Digital amnesia: The aftermath of a screenshot.","authors":"Sophia P Fabrizio, Rebecca Lurie, Deanne L Westerman","doi":"10.3758/s13421-026-01921-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01921-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":48398,"journal":{"name":"Memory & Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148670895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The impact of a relational mindset on retrieval-induced forgetting.","authors":"Kai Shi, Fang Ma, Jiansheng Li","doi":"10.3758/s13421-026-01866-6","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13421-026-01866-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study examined whether inducing a general relational mindset could reduce retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). In three experiments, a relational mindset was induced by solving cross-domain analogy problems, with a within-domain analogy task serving as the control, followed by a retrieval test for all participants. The results revealed that, regardless of whether the task was an item recognition test (Experiment 1) or a classical retrieval practice paradigm (Experiment 2), participants in the relational mindset induction group showed no significant difference in recalling nonpracticed items (Rp-) with baseline items (Nrp), whereas participants in the within-domain analogy task control group exhibited significant retrieval-induced forgetting. Experiment 3 extended Experiment 2 by adding a no-task control group that directly underwent a retrieval-practice task. The results confirmed that retrieval-induced forgetting was observed in both the within-domain analogy task control and no-task control groups but was eliminated in the relational mindset induction group. Additionally, supplementary trial-level analyses in Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that higher performance on the induction task was associated with better recall of Rp- items, suggesting that a strong relational mindset may even lead to retrieval-induced facilitation. These findings suggest that inducing a general relational mindset could reduce retrieval-induced forgetting. In addition, the general relational mindset is unrelated to the specific content of learning, allowing educators to apply this approach in some cases to effectively reduce RIF.</p>","PeriodicalId":48398,"journal":{"name":"Memory & Cognition","volume":" ","pages":"2244-2257"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147322534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Does signed prediction error drive declarative memory? Evidence from variable choice paradigms.","authors":"Kshipra Gurunandan, Andrea Greve, Ella Wilmot, Richard N Henson","doi":"10.3758/s13421-026-01864-8","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13421-026-01864-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Prediction error (PE) is the discrepancy between predictions and new information. For a binary reward outcome, PE may be signed (positive if the outcome was better than predicted and negative if the outcome was worse than predicted) or unsigned (absolute value of \"surprise\"). Using a \"variable choice\" paradigm, De Loof et al. (PLOS ONE, 131, Article e0189212, 2018) examined the role of PE in one-shot learning of unknown translations of known words and showed that associative memory for the translation was greater when (financial) reward was more unexpected and lesser when an expected reward was not received (i.e., signed PE); an effect that they replicated in several subsequent studies. However, other work on PE in declarative memory has assumed that memory is greater when an outcome is more unexpected, without any explicit reward (i.e., unsigned PE). We replicated De Loof et al.'s paradigm with and without financial reward, and found that memory was explained slightly better by unsigned PE (Experiments 1A-1B). However, we also identified a potential confound in the paradigm that could explain the results without any role of PE, as confirmed by simulations. We therefore designed a modified version of the paradigm that circumvents this confound (Experiment 2). Results were inconsistent with the PE account. We conclude that variable choice paradigms may not be well-suited to investigate the role of PE in one-shot declarative learning, and that the purported role of signed PE in declarative memory requires further investigation.</p>","PeriodicalId":48398,"journal":{"name":"Memory & Cognition","volume":" ","pages":"2212-2227"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13461684/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147475898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fast reasoning uses semantic activation as an intuitive cue.","authors":"Henry Markovits, Valerie A Thompson, Elyse Bergeron","doi":"10.3758/s13421-026-01859-5","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13421-026-01859-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Logical reasoning is often presumed to require effortful cognition. However, there is evidence that reasoners may have access to a form of intuition that relies on variations in the availability of semantically related information. This may provide intuitive cues for judgments of conclusion validity or invalidity, allowing for very rapid forms of reasoning that do not rely on belief-based heuristics. We examined very rapid reasoning with formally identical syllogisms where the major premise was characterized by having relative Few or Many alternative antecedents. In four studies, we examined premises that had identical formal structure and syntax, with minimal differences in content, using two forms of invalid inferences: (\"All A are B. X is B. X is A.\"; \"All A are B. X is not A. X is not B.\"), and one valid form (\"All A are B. X is not B. X is not A.\"). All studies showed that under severe time constraint reasoners judged that the putative conclusion was invalid more often for premises with Many alternative antecedents than for those with Few alternatives. These results support the conclusion that semantically activated information can serve as a cue for intuitive, rapid inferences.</p>","PeriodicalId":48398,"journal":{"name":"Memory & Cognition","volume":" ","pages":"2152-2164"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146195529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Influence of morphological and pseudo-morphological boundaries on activating embedded words when accessing compounds and pseudo-compounds.","authors":"Alexander Taikh, Christina L Gagné, Thomas Spalding","doi":"10.3758/s13421-026-01883-5","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13421-026-01883-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>According to the edge-aligned embedded word activation theory and the principle of full decomposition (Grainger & Beyersmann, 2017), (pseudo)morphemes are extracted from both edges of the whole word based on orthographic information. For example, car is extracted from the compound carport, where it functions as a morpheme, and from the pseudo-compound carpet, where it does not, and is suppressed by the pseudo-compound. Embedded words should receive activation when the whole word can be decomposed into constituent (pseudo)morphemes, and accessing one embedded (pseudo)morpheme should facilitate access to another one. Using English compound words, Taikh et al. (2024) found that replacing boundary letters slowed down processing of the whole compound word, while replacing constituent-internal letters did not, which is consistent with the principle of full decomposition. Whereas replacing boundary letters interferes with access to both constituents, replacing constituent-internal letters allows access to the unaltered constituent. In the present study, we first replicate the findings of Taikh et al. using English compounds and then examine the principle of full decomposition in English pseudo-compounds. We find that replacing pseudo-boundary and pseudo-constituent letters slows down the processing of a pseudo-compound to a similar extent, suggesting that accessing an unaltered pseudo-constituent does not facilitate processing the altered pseudo-constituent. Our findings are consistent with the idea that embedded pseudo-constituents are suppressed by the pseudo-compound and thus do not facilitate its access. Additionally, embedded words may not receive facilitation if the recognition of the entire word requires that they be suppressed strongly enough.</p>","PeriodicalId":48398,"journal":{"name":"Memory & Cognition","volume":" ","pages":"2453-2471"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147677861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}