This paper examines the idea that attraction to music is generated at a cognitive level through the formation and activation of networks of interlinked "nodes." Although the networks involved are vast, the basic mechanism for activating the links is relatively simple. Two comprehensive cognitive-behavioral models of musical engagement are examined with the aim of identifying the underlying cogn...

Emotional arousal appears to be a major contributing factor to the pleasure that listeners experience in response to music. Accordingly, a strong positive correlation between self-reported pleasure and electrodermal activity (EDA), an objective indicator of emotional arousal, has been demonstrated when individuals listen to familiar music. However, it is not yet known to what extent familiarity...

Retrieval practice of previously studied material can impair subsequent memory for related unpracticed material. An emerging view holds that such retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) may affect episodic recollection, but not the context-free familiarity of the affected items. Here, a survey of accruing recent findings of RIF in recognition tests shows that the impairment of unpracticed material d...

Familiarity and recollection are two independent cognitive processes involved in recognition memory. It is traditionally believed that both familiarity and recollection can support item recognition, whereas only recollection can support associative recognition. Here, using a standard associative recognition task, we examined whether associative retrieval of unitized associations involved differ...

The class will focus on two themes: linear algebra and probability, and their many applications in algorithm design. We will cover a number of classical examples, including: fast matrix multiplication, FFT, error correcting codes, cryptography, efficient data structures, combinatorial optimization, routing, and more. We assume basic familiarity (undergraduate level) with linear algebra, probabi...

Social interactions elicit androgen responses whose function has been posited to be the adjustment of androgen-dependent behaviors to social context. The activation of this androgen response is known to be mediated and moderated by psychological factors. In this study we tested the hypothesis that the testosterone (T) changes after a competition are not simply related to its outcome, but rather...

Amnesia leads to a deficit in recollection that leaves familiarity-based recognition relatively spared. Familiarity is thought to be based on the fluent processing of studied items compared to novel items. However, whether amnesic patients respond normally to direct manipulations of processing fluency is not yet known. In the current study, we manipulated processing fluency by preceding each te...

Recording eye movements provides information on the time-course of word recognition during reading. Juhasz and Rayner [Juhasz, B. J., & Rayner, K. (2003). Investigating the effects of a set of intercorrelated variables on eye fixation durations in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 29, 1312-1318] examined the impact of five word recognition variables, i...