Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Both congruent and incongruent trials drive the congruency sequence effect: Novel support for an episodic retrieval view of adaptive control in the prime–probe task.
The congruency effect in Stroop-like tasks—a popular measure of distraction—is smaller after incongruent relative to congruent trials. However, it is unclear whether this congruency sequence effect (CSE)—a popular index of coping with distraction—reflects adjustments of control after congruent trials, incongruent trials, or both. The episodic retrieval account of the CSE posits adjustments of control after both congruent and incongruent trials. In this account, retrieving a memory of the previous trial’s congruency (i.e., congruent or incongruent) biases control processes to prepare for an upcoming trial with the same congruency (i.e., congruent or incongruent). In contrast, the default setting account posits adjustments of control after a single trial type. For example, control processes might increase inhibition of the response cued by the distractor after incongruent trials but make no adjustments after congruent trials. To distinguish between these accounts for the first time while (a) using long distractor–target intervals and (b) excluding prevalent feature integration and contingency learning confounds, we employed a confound-minimized prime–probe task with neutral trials. We usually observed adjustments of control after both trial types. Furthermore, whether the reduction of the congruency effect after incongruent trials indexed (a) inhibition of the distractor–congruent response or (b) activation of the distractor–incongruent response depended on whether the distractor and target were same-sized or different-sized, respectively. These findings favor the episodic retrieval account of the CSE over the default setting account. They also indicate that “low-level” stimulus properties may influence the nature of “high-level” control adjustments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Testing the response suppression mechanism of working memory.
Many working memory (WM) paradigms involve recalling multiple items from the same memory set. Participants rarely repeat items they have already recalled, avoiding repetition errors. To prevent these errors, WM models incorporate a response suppression mechanism that removes recalled items from the set of response options. Despite its importance for our understanding of WM, response suppression has received limited direct testing. To address this gap, we used computational models implementing two hypothetical mechanisms of response suppression to derive predictions and tested these predictions experimentally. Participants were asked to recall the same items multiple times during a single trial. If already recalled items are removed from the response set to prevent repetition errors, memory performance should be impaired when the same item is tested again. Contrary to this, we found that memory performance was unimpaired when the same item was tested a second time, and even displayed a recall advantage. Therefore, this study demonstrates the implausibility of response suppression to account for how people avoid repetition errors. We discuss alternative explanations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Two sources of color–word contingency learning: Episodic retrieval of stimulus–response bindings and propositional knowledge.
There is an ongoing debate about the cognitive mechanisms behind human contingency learning (CL). Although, in some studies, episodic retrieval of previous responses fully explained the observed CL effects (C. G. Giesen et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2020), other findings suggest that global contingencies have an additional effect on behavior (Xu & Mordkoff, 2020). In a high-powered (N = 500), preregistered study, we investigated CL effects after controlling for episodic retrieval of distractor–target (S–S) and distractor–response (S–R) bindings. Retrieval explained a large part of the CL effect. However, we still found a reliable residual CL effect even after controlling for retrieval. Notably, the residual CL effect depended on contingency awareness: The residual CL effect only occurred for trials for which participants correctly detected the respective color–word contingency, whereas for trials without contingency awareness, there was no residual CL effect. Collectively, our findings suggest that human CL is driven by two independent sources: (a) episodic retrieval of S–S and S–R bindings and (b) propositional knowledge of the contingencies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Evidence for response inhibition as a control process distinct from the common executive function: A two-study factor analysis.
The dominant model of executive functions, which has held for over two decades, contends that various aspects of seemingly disparate forms of inhibitory control—for example, inhibiting a prepotent response, or inhibiting irrelevant thoughts and distractions—are in fact manifestations of a single latent executive function. Recent work, however, has cast doubt on this dominant model, as certain conditions can dissociate performance on tasks thought to index inhibitory control. Moreover, issues related to task reliability and latent estimation of inhibition processes have prompted questions about whether the structure of inhibitory control can even be reliably estimated at a latent level. We addressed these issues in two studies of healthy young adults (Study 1 N = 154, Study 2, N = 279), examining seven then 12 different tasks taken by prior research to assess inhibitory control. Contrary to the dominant model of executive functions, we found that, at a latent level, inhibitory control was best fit by a replicable two-factor solution, with response inhibition as a distinct executive function. Further, our data suggested that prior work on executive functions may not have observed a response inhibition factor due to task selections (i.e., including either one of two specific tasks was critical to identifying a separate response inhibition factor). Therefore, contrary to the current primary theoretical model of executive functions, these results suggest that response inhibition is, in fact, a distinct control process from the control process underpinning other forms of inhibition, which has important implications for designing interventions and assessing outcomes related to inhibitory control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Effects of emotional valence of mind wandering on sustained attention performance.
The construct of mind wandering has notoriously been characterized as heterogenous which may mean that not all types of mind wandering produce the same pattern of results. One operationalization of mind wandering, task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs), can also itself vary in many dimensions, including the emotional valence of TUTs. The current study summarizes several years of work examining the impact that the emotional valence of TUTs has on different aspects of sustained attention. Participants in several studies reported whether their TUTs were negative, neutral, or positive in emotional valence during a sustained attention-to-response task (SART). The first major focus was a meta-analysis where we examined correlations between each TUT valence and SART performance measures. For the second major focus, we tested how different TUT valences changed over the course of the task. The results suggest that negative TUTs typically show stronger associations with SART performance measures, although all TUT valences have numerically similar correlations. Regarding time-on-task effects, across the studies, there was consistent evidence for a linear increase in negative TUTs across blocks. Evidence for this linear increase was not consistent for neutral and positive TUTs. The results of the current study suggest that the relationships between TUTs and performance, and their likelihood of occurring during a task, are not necessarily the same for every type of TUT. These results highlight the importance of continuing to investigate different types of TUTs and different forms of mind wandering, in general, to better understand how this phenomenon occurs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Memory modeling of counterfactual generation.
We use a computational model of memory search to study how people generate counterfactual outcomes in response to an established target outcome. Hierarchical Bayesian model fitting to data from six experiments reveals that counterfactual outcomes that are perceived as more desirable and more likely to occur are also more likely to come to mind and are generated earlier than other outcomes. Additionally, core memory mechanisms such as semantic clustering and word frequency biases have a strong influence on retrieval dynamics in counterfactual thinking. Finally, we find that the set of counterfactuals that come to mind can be manipulated by modifying the total number of counterfactuals that participants are prompted to generate, and our model can predict these effects. Overall, our findings demonstrate how computational memory search models can be integrated with current theories of counterfactual thinking to provide novel insights into the process of generating counterfactual thoughts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
The role of working memory capacity in the temporal compression of episodic memories: An individual differences approach.
Remembering past events usually takes less time than their actual duration—their unfolding is temporally compressed in episodic memory. The rate of temporal compression (i.e., the ratio of the actual duration of an event to the duration of its remembering) is not constant but varies between individuals and as a function of the structure of events (e.g., how they can be divided into shorter subevents). However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying these variations remain poorly understood. Given its role in the encoding and retrieval of information in episodic memory, working memory (WM) capacity could be an important determinant of temporal compression rates. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments in which we asked participants to watch and then mentally replay short videos showing people engaged in daily life activities. We showed that temporal compression rates depend on an interplay between WM and the structure of the remembered events: participants’ WM capacity (assessed using complex span tasks) was negatively associated with temporal compression rates, but only when the remembered events contained few event boundaries (i.e., few subevents). This suggests that the temporal compression of events in episodic memory emerges when some of the subevents to be retained are too long to be fully represented in WM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Driving factors of individual differences in broad retrieval ability: Gr is more than the sum of its parts.
Broad retrieval ability (Gr) posits an essential factor of human cognitive abilities. Previous literature indicates Gr is best modeled as a higher-order factor model with lower-level factors such as ideational fluency (IF), word fluency (WF), expressional fluency (EF), or figural fluency (FF). However, the dimensionality of Gr is not well studied. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether specific retrieval affordances such as differing retrieval time periods (e.g., short vs. long) can be psychometrically separated from more general retrieval affordances. Such a distinction would imply differential associations between specific retrieval, general retrieval, and other cognitive abilities, which, in turn, depict a vital part of explanatory models of individual differences in Gr. To test these assumptions, we conducted a multivariate study (N = 331) and evaluated competing latent variable measurement models for a variety of Gr tests. We then regressed the best measurement model onto working memory capacity, secondary memory, mental speed, and crystallized intelligence in order to evaluate the distinctiveness of Gr. Our results suggest that no specific retrieval affordances with regard to time periods can be distinguished. A higher-order model, with a second-order Gr factor above three first-order factors (IF, WF, EF, and FF) fitted the data best, extending previous literature by increasing construct coverage through the implementation of FF. All covariates show incremental predictive validity, beyond their communality. Summarizing, our results endorse a perspective on Gr as a strong and discriminant factor of cognitive abilities that is not affected by time constraints, and show that Gr is more than a linear combination of its parts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
“Wait, how did you call this?”: Speaker-specific word choices are stored and generalized.
It has been repeatedly shown that individuals track speaker-specific language use during interaction. Most studies focused on how this facilitates meaning inference when interspeaker variation differentiates between two or more alternatives, or how it allows for successful lexical alignment. However, it has been unclear whether mapping interspeaker variation is stored actively, and if so, what purposes this storage serves. In a pseudointeractive experiment, we created interspeaker variation in naming preferences, such that one speaker (the common speaker) consistently produced favored words, and the other speaker consistently produced less-favored/disfavored words (the uncommon speaker), across two conditions—one where both speakers were relatively common, and one where one of the speakers was highly uncommon. Participants engaged in a picture selection task, at first as matchers (where they were instructed by one of the speakers—each in his/her turn—which image to choose), and then as directors (where they were the instructors). They were then tested on how well they mapped interspeaker variation and how they generalized it linguistically and socially. Participants were successful at directly mapping interspeaker variation in naming preferences. Furthermore, they used this information in (a) lexically aligning with their interlocutors, (b) hypothesizing about unexposed word choices by these speakers, and (c) creating social representations of the speakers as individuals. In line with surprisal-driven learning accounts, these effects were larger for a speaker that used highly uncommon words. Our results suggest that individuals store interspeaker variation explicitly, which in turn helps them to predict their interlocutors’ future linguistic and social behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition - Vol 51, Iss 2