Two experiments examine the effect on an immediate recall test of simulating a reverberant auditory environment in which auditory distracters in the form of speech are played to the participants (the ‘irrelevant sound effect’). An echo-intensive environment simulated by the addition of reverberation to the speech reduced the extent of ‘changes in state’ in the irrelevant speech stream by smooth...

Chunking models offer a parsimonious explanation of how people acquire knowledge and have been validated in domains such as expert behaviour and the acquisition of language. In this paper, we review two computational theories based on chunking mechanisms (the chunking theory and the template theory) and show what insight they offer for instruction and training. The suggested implications includ...

reasoning 27.0 (7.5) 26.8 (7.4) Mental rotation 34.9 (18.5) 38.9 (19.4) Visualization of views 11.5 (7.8) 12.8 (8.3) Values in parentheses indicate standard deviations. 492 M. Keehner et al. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 20: 487–503 (2006) participants with the task) comprised five target boxes that were relatively easy to solve because they required laparoscop...

This article argues that conducting experiments involving the ability to control and even manipulate the cognitive load in working memory (WM; storage and or processing load) should make it possible to identify the processes involved during the integration of information coming from multiple sources. Some experiments using the dual-task paradigm are reviewed, and an original experiment using co...

Recent psychological research on memory has demonstrated that the act of remembering can also prompt forgetting, or more specifically, the inhibition of particular items in memory (i.e. retrievalinduced forgetting). Extending this line of inquiry, this article reports the findings from two studies designed to establish whether retrieval-induced forgetting can occur for meaningful stimuli that c...

People retell events for different reasons. Sometimes they try to be accurate, other times entertaining. What characterizes retellings from different perspectives? How does retelling perspective affect later recall of events? In the current research, participants retold a story either three times or not at all. By instruction, retellings were either entertaining or accurate. Compared to accurat...

In Study 1, 193 children, half in New York City and half in Recife, Brazil, heard hypothetical dilemmas about whether to keep a promise or tell the truth. An adult interviewer suggested the alternative to the child’s initial choice. Younger children (5 to 8 year olds) were more suggestible than older children (10 to 12 year olds), US more than Brazilian children; and suggestibility occurred mor...

Research has demonstrated that imagination can be used to affect behaviour and also to distort memory, yet few studies have examined whether the effects of imagination on behavioural estimates and memory are related. In two experiments, the effects of imagination on self-reported behaviour and subsequent memory for that behaviour were investigated. A comparison of behavioural estimates collecte...

Mental health questionnaires often ask respondents to report how frequently they experience different emotions. We report two experiments designed to assess the accuracy of these reports and the strategies used to generate them. Each day for 2 weeks, participants in Experiment 1 filled out a webbased emotions-and-activities checklist. Then, they estimated the diary-period frequency of these emo...

This study investigated the dynamics of communication between members of an emergency management team faced with controlling a hazardous chemical spill. The effects of two sets of factors on communication were investigated; task-specific factors pertaining to characteristics of the emergency management task that are constant across different emergency situations, and situationspecific factors p...