Memory for repeated items often improves when repetitions are separated by other items—a phenomenon called the spacing effect. In two experiments, we explored the complex interaction between study strategies, serial position, and spacing effects. When people studied several unmixed lists, they initially used mainly rote rehearsal, but some people eventually adopted relational encoding strategie...

Distinguishing between living (animate) and nonliving (inanimate) things is essential for survival and successful reproduction. Animacy is widely recognized as a foundational dimension, appearing early in development, but its role in remembering is currently unknown. We report two studies suggesting that animacy is a critical mnemonic dimension and is one of the most important item dimensions u...

The article contains an edition of mnemonic poems from the late 15th century and first half 16th century, discovered in Archdiocese Archives Gniezno. They contain conditions for good confession, church commandments, reminders Franciscan rule.

Optimizing learning over multiple retrieval opportunities requires a joint consideration of both the probability and the mnemonic value of a successful retrieval. Previous research has addressed this trade-off by manipulating the schedule of practice trials, suggesting that a pattern of increasingly long lags-"expanding retrieval practice"-may keep retrievals successful while gradually increasi...

The aim of the present research was to investigate the impact of abnormal fetal environment on explicit memory performance. Based on animal models, it was hypothesized that infants of diabetic mothers (IDMs) experience perturbations in memory performance due to exposure to multiple neurologic risk factors including: chronic hypoxia, hyperglycemia/reactive hypoglycemia, and iron deficiency. Memo...

In studies of episodic memory retrieval, recognition paradigms are known to elicit robust activations in the inferior parietal lobe. However, damage to this region does not produce severe deficits in episodic memory performance as indexed by typical accuracy measures. Rather, because problems with memory confidence are frequently reported, the observed deficits may be best described as "metamem...