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The authors introduce a model of skill acquisition that incorporates elements of both traditional models and models based on embedded cognition by striking a balance between top-down and bottom-up control. A knowledge representation is used in which pre- and postconditions are attached to actions. This model captures improved performance due to learning not only in terms of shorter solution times and lower error rates during the task but also in an increased flexibility to solve similar problems and robustness against unexpected events. In 3 experiments using a complex aviation task, the authors contrasted instructions that explicitly stated pre- and postconditions with conventional instructions that did not. The instructions with pre- and postconditions led to better and more robust performance than other instructions, especially on problems that required transfer. The parameters of the model were estimated to obtain a quantitative fit of the results of Experiment 1, which was then successfully used to predict the results of Experiments 2 and 3.

In a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment that used midazolam, a benzodiazepine that creates temporary amnesia, we compared acquisition and retention of paired associates of different types. Some word pairs were studied before the injection of saline or midazolam, and two lists of word pairs were studied after the injection. Critical comparisons involved retention of pairs that were practiced on all three lists, pairs studied on only one list, and pairs that involved recombining cue and response terms from one list to the next, as a function of drug condition. Previous research with benzodiazepines had found retrograde facilitation for material acquired prior to injection, compared with the control condition. One explanation for this facilitation is that the anterograde amnesia produced by the benzodiazepine frees up the hippocampus to better consolidate previously learned material (Wixted, 2004(Wixted, , 2005. We accounted for a rich data set using a simple computational model that incorporated interference effects (cue overload) at retrieval for both general (experimental context) interference and specific (stimulus term) interference without the need to postulate a role for consolidation. The computational model as an Excel spreadsheet may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.Psychologists have long investigated the class of mechanisms that affect retention of past experience. Wixted (2004Wixted ( , 2005 notes that psychologists have ignored the role of consolidation while debating the role of interference and decay as mechanisms of forgetting. He reviews evidence from psychology, psychopharmacology, and neuroscience to argue that the traditional psychological theories of forgetting "may not be relevant to the kind of interference that induces most forgetting in everyday life" (p.6). Wixted reviews evidence from Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to L. M. Reder, Psychology Department, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (e-mail: reder@cmu.edu). Archived MaterialsThe following materials [and links] associated with this article may be accessed through the Psychonomic Society's Norms, Stimuli, and Data archive, www.psychonomic.org/archive. To access these files [or links], search the archive for this article using the journal name (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review), the first author's name (Reder), and the publication year (2007 psychopharmacology to support the claim that general interference or "mental exertion" is a major determinant in whether information is forgotten. In particular he notes that benzodiazepines, which produce amnesia for material learned after the drug, create retrograde facilitation for material learned before the drug. He argues that this results from the absence of mental exertion. This article reports a new study designed to understand the mechanisms that underlie the retrograde facilitation observed under the influence of benzodiazepines.Studies using benzodiazepines, such as diazepam (Valium) and alprazolam...

K. J. Malmberg, J. Holden, and R. M. reported more false alarms for low-than highfrequency words when the foils were similar to the targets. According to the source of activation confusion (SAC) model of memory, that pattern is based on recollection of an underspecified episodic trace rather than the error-prone familiarity process. The authors tested the SAC account by varying whether participants were warned about the nature of similar foils and whether the recognition test required the discrimination. More false alarms for low-frequency similar items occurred only when participants were not warned at study about the subtle features to be discriminated later. The differential false-alarm rate by word frequency corresponded to the pattern of remember responses obtained when the test instructions did not ask for a subtle discrimination, supporting the SAC account that reversed false-alarm rates to similar foils are based on the recollection process.Keywords word frequency; item similarity; recognition; recollection; encoding instructions When words with different normative frequencies are studied, low-frequency words are better recognized than high-frequency words, and low-frequency words show lower false-alarm rates than high-frequency words. This effect has been termed the word frequency mirror effect (Glanzer & Adams, 1985). The word frequency mirror effect has been extensively studied in recognition (e.g., Arndt & Reder, 2002;Balota, Burgess, Cortese, & Adams, 2002;Glanzer & Adams, 1990;Guttentag & Carroll, 1997;Hintzman, 1994;Hirshman, Fisher, Henthorn, Arndt, & Passanante, 2002;Joordens & Hockley, 2000;Malmberg, Steyvers, Stephens, & Shiffrin, 2002;Murdock, 1998Murdock, ,2003Reder, Angstadt, Cary, Erickson, & Ayers, 2002), and many theoretical accounts have been proposed for it. Reder and her colleagues (Reder et al., 2000) suggested a mechanism for the word frequency mirror effect based on a dual-process model of recognition called source of activation confusion (SAC).According to the SAC account for the word frequency mirror effect, the words of different normative frequencies have different numbers of prior contextual associations that fan out from their respective concept nodes. Differential fan affects the amount of activation that spreads from the concept node to any specific memory trace such that the more links that share activation, the less activation reaches any one node. Low-frequency words have a smaller contextual fan because they have been seen less frequently. Therefore, the activation that spreads to the relevant study episode is greater when the source node sending activation is low

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