Medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures often respond to stimulus repetition with a reduction in neural activity. Such novelty/familiarity responses reflect the mnemonic consequences of initial stimulus encounter, although the aspects of initial processing that lead to novelty/familiarity responses remain unspecified. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment examined th...

Previous studies have reported seemingly conflicting results regarding how the amount of stimulus similarity between two simultaneously presented target stimuli impacts perceptual performance. There are many reports of 'repetition blindness', where individuals do worse when shown two similar stimuli relative to two different stimuli. On the other hand, there are reports of 'similarity grouping'...

Does the explicit task-cuing procedure require an endogenous a act of control? In 5 experiments, cues indicating which task to perform preceded targets by several stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Two models were developed to account for changes in reaction time (RT) with SOA. Model 1 assumed an endogenous act of task switching for cue alterations but not for cue repetitions. Model 2 assumed ...

This report presents an analysis of speech productions obtained from 14 children with cochlear implants who completed a nonword repetition task. The stimuli consisted of 20 auditorily-presented multisyllabic nonwords. The analyses reported here include a descriptive analysis of the children’s errors, and a summary of how accurately the children imitated the duration, number of syllables, and in...

The compound-cue model of cognitive control in task switching explains switch cost in terms of a switch of task cues rather than of a switch of tasks. The present study asked whether the model generalizes to Lag 2 repetition cost (also known as backward inhibition), a related effect in which the switch from B to A in ABA task sequences is costlier than is the same switch in CBA task sequences. ...

Four experiments examined ironic effects of repetition, effects opposite to those desired (cf. D. M. Wegner, 1994). For an exclusion task, participants were to respond "yes" to words heard earlier but "no" to words that were read earlier. Results from young adults given adequate time to respond showed that false alarms to earlier-read words decreased with their repetition. An opposite, ironic e...

We investigated if task switching affects late response processes that occur after the selection of a response. Subjects performed a sequence of two responses. The first and second response were selected, and then executed in close succession. The interresponse interval (IRI) was taken as a measure of late response processes. The two responses could either belong to different tasks (task-switch...

In natural conversation, speakers often mention the same referents multiple times. While referents that have been previously mentioned are produced with less prominence than those that have not been mentioned, it is unclear whether prominence reduction is due to repetition of concepts, words, or a combination of the two. In the current study, we dissociate these sources of repetition by examini...