Although there has been steady progress elucidating the influence of emotion on cognition, it remains unclear precisely when and why emotion impairs or facilitates cognition. The present study investigated the mechanisms involved in the influence of emotion on perception and working memory (WM), using modified 0-back and 2-back tasks, respectively. First, results showed that attentional focus m...

Memory is a binary process relying on a short-term form lasting minutes to forge and communicate with a long-term form lasting years. Yale's Bicentennial Symposium opened with a lecture elucidating the obscure process of long-term memory formation. From his decades of research, Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel offered insight into the molecular framework that is long term-memory.

Working memory (WM) is the ability to maintain and manipulate task-relevant information in the absence of sensory input. While its improvement through training is of great interest, the degree to which WM training transfers to untrained WM tasks (near transfer) and other untrained cognitive skills (far transfer) remains debated and the mechanism(s) underlying transfer are unclear. Here we hypot...

Number-space associations are a robust observation, but their underlying mechanisms remain debated. Two major accounts have been identified. First, spatial codes may constitute an intrinsic part of number representations stored in the brain - a perspective most commonly referred to as the Mental Number Line account. Second, spatial codes may be generated at the level of working memory when numb...

The goal of this randomized controlled trial was to investigate whether Jungle Memory working memory training (JM) affects performance on working memory tasks, performance in mathematics and gains made on a mathematics training (MT) in school aged children between 9-12 years old (N = 64) with both difficulties in mathematics, as well as attention and working memory. Children were randomly assig...

Orienting attention retrospectively to selective contents in working memory (WM) influences performance. A separate line of research has shown that stimulus strength shapes perceptual representations. There is little research on how stimulus strength during encoding shapes WM performance, and how effects of retrospective orienting might vary with changes in stimulus strength. We explore these q...

Aiming to further our understanding of fundamental mechanisms of auditory working memory (WM), the present study compared performance for three auditory materials (words, tones, timbres). In a forward recognition task (Experiment 1) participants indicated whether the order of the items in the second sequence was the same as in the first sequence. In a backward recognition task (Experiment 2) pa...

Here, we aimed to determine the capacity of human short-term memory for allocentric spatial information in a real-world setting. Young adults were tested on their ability to learn, on a trial-unique basis, and remember over a 1-min interval the location(s) of 1, 3, 5, or 7 illuminating pads, among 23 pads distributed in a 4m×4m arena surrounded by curtains on three sides. Participants had to wa...

The anger superiority effect shows that an angry face is detected more efficiently than a happy face. However, it is still controversial whether attentional allocation to angry faces is a bottom-up process or not. We investigated whether the anger superiority effect is influenced by top-down control, especially working memory (WM). Participants remembered a colour and then searched for differen...

Errors in short-term memory increase with the quantity of information stored, limiting the complexity of cognition and behavior. In visual memory, attempts to account for errors in terms of allocation of a limited pool of working memory resources have met with some success, but the biological basis for this cognitive architecture is unclear. An alternative perspective attributes recall errors t...