The influence of pre-experimental autobiographical knowledge on recognition memory was investigated using as memoranda faces that were either personally known or unknown to the participant. Under a dual process theory, such knowledge boosted both recollection- and familiarity-based recognition judgements. Under an unequal variance signal detection model, pre-experimental knowledge increased bot...

Individuals can use both linguistic and non-linguistic features of the speech signal to identify talkers. For instance, listeners have more difficulty identifying talkers in unfamiliar languages compared to a native language (language familiarity effect), implying that language-specific knowledge aids talker identification. In the present study, the source of the language familiarity benefit on...

Does familiarity promote attraction? Prior research has generally suggested that it does, but a recent set of studies by Norton, Frost, and Ariely (2007) challenged that assumption. Instead, they found that more information about another person, when that information was randomly selected from lists of trait adjectives, using a trait evaluation paradigm, promoted perceptions of dissimilarity an...

Throughout our lives we acquire general knowledge about the world (semantic memory) while also retaining memories of specific events (episodic memory). Although these two forms of memory have been dissociated on the basis of neuropsychological data, it is clear that they typically function together during normal cognition. The goal of the present study was to investigate this interaction. One i...

This study examines the effect of familiarity, context, and linguistic convention on idiom comprehension in Mandarin speaking children. Two experiments (a comprehension task followed by a comprehension task coupled with a metapragmatic task) were administered to test participants in three age groups (6 and 9-year-olds, and an adult control group). Laval (Journal of Pragmatics 35(2):723-739, 200...

The influence of pre-experimental autobiographical knowledge on recognition memory was investigated using as memoranda faces that were either personally known or unknown to the participant. Under a dual process theory, such knowledge boosted both recollectionand familiarity-based recognition judgements. Under an unequal variance signal detection model, pre-experimental knowledge increased both ...