Theoretically, prospective memory retrieval can be accomplished either by controlled monitoring of the environment for a target event or by a more reflexive process that spontaneously responds to the presence of a target event. These views were evaluated in Experiments 1-4 by examining whether performing a prospective memory task produced costs on the speed of performing the ongoing task. In Experiment 5, the authors directly tested for the existence of spontaneous retrieval. The results supported the multiprocess theory (M. A. McDaniel & G. O. Einstein, 2000) predictions that (a) spontaneous retrieval can occur and can support good prospective memory and (b) depending on task demands and individual differences, people rely to different degrees on monitoring versus spontaneous retrieval for prospective remembering.

Summary: We examined whether learning from quizzing arises from memorization of answers or fosters more complete understanding of the quizzed content. In middle-school science classes, we spaced three multiple-choice quizzes on content in a unit. In Experiment 1, the class exams included questions given on quizzes, transfer questions targeting the same content, and content that had not been quizzed (control content). The quizzing procedure was associated with significant learning benefits with large effect sizes and similar effect sizes for both transfer items and identical items. In Experiment 2, quiz questions focused on definitional information or application of the principle. Application questions increased exam performance for definitional-type questions and for different application questions. Definition questions did not confer benefits for application questions. Test-enhanced learning, in addition to other factors in the present quizzing protocol (repeated, spaced presentation of the content), may create deeper understanding that leads to certain types of transfer.

Previous work has shown that older adults encode lexical and semantic information about verbal distractors and use that information to facilitate performance on subsequent tasks. In this study, we investigated whether older adults also form associations between distractors and co-occurring targets. In two experiments, participants performed a 1-back task on pictures superimposed with irrelevant words; 10 min later, participants were given a paired-associates memory task without reference to the 1-back task. The study list included preserved and re-paired (disrupted) pairs from the 1-back task. Older adults showed a memory advantage for preserved pairs and a disadvantage for disrupted pairs, whereas younger adults performed similarly across pair types. These results suggest the existence of a hyper-binding phenomenon in which older adults encode seemingly extraneous co-occurrences in the environment and transfer this knowledge to subsequent tasks. This increased knowledge of how events covary may be the reason why real-world decision-making ability is retained, or even enhanced, with age.

This study examined young and older adults' attentional biases and subsequent incidental recognition memory for distracting positive, negative, and neutral words. Younger adults were more distracted by negative stimuli than by positive or neutral stimuli and they correctly recognized more negative than positive words. Older adults, however, attended equally to all stimuli yet showed reliable recognition only for positive words. Thus, although an attentional bias towards negative words carries over into recognition performance for younger adults, older adults' bias appears to be limited to remembering positive information. KeywordsAging; emotion; emotional memory; attention; positivity effect The Influence of Emotional Valence on Age Differences in Early Processing and MemoryMuch research in the field of cognitive aging is rooted in the information processing approach of experimental psychology wherein participants engage in basic cognitive tasks that attempt to isolate particular processes and control for additional factors that could influence performance. However, recent research suggests that there may be a number of factors that are at least partially independent of cognitive ability that influence age differences in memory performance (see Hess, 2005, for a review).

Nissen and Bullemer (1987)reported that implicit motor sequence learning was disrupted by the addition of a secondary task. They suggested that this effect was due to the attentionalload that the secondary task adds. Recently it has been suggested that the attentionalload is not critical, but rather that the secondary task affects timing, either by lengthening or by making inconsistent the response-tostimulus interval (RSI)-that is, the delay between when a subject makes a response and when the next stimulus appears. In six experiments we manipulated the RSIand found no support for these two hypotheses. An inconsistent RSIdid not adversely affect implicit motor sequence learning. A long RSI did not affect learning, although under some conditions subjects did not express learning if the RSIwas long. These results are interpreted as reflecting the effects of attention.